What's New: Subscription Billing (2024 release wave 2)

Overview

The video introduces the new Subscription Billing module for recurring invoicing. It explains the new concepts (contracts, service commitments, billing proposals, deferrals) and walks through a demo: a sales order with hardware and maintenance services, order confirmation, contract creation and assignment, billing proposal and invoice creation, and deferral entries and their release.

The second half covers extending a contract with service commitments, reporting, and usage-based billing. The usage-based part shows importing external usage data, processing it into billing data and invoices, and mapping it to contracts. Excel reports and a Power BI embedded app are mentioned as coming in minor release 25.2.

Key points

Contracts hold service commitments that define what is invoiced (tickets, minutes, usage or recurring services). Commitments must be assigned to a contract before billing.
Billing proposals can be generated once a contract is set up. They can cover the next invoice, several invoices or an extended period, and can be filtered by contract and period.
The demo contract uses a 12-month billing base period and an annual billing rhythm.
Posting an annual invoice creates deferral entries automatically. A batch job releases them by date range to move revenue to GL accounts.
Only service commitments that support recurring billing can be added to an existing contract. Arbitrary lines cannot be added.
Usage-based billing imports external usage data from a file. It needs a data supplier and item references set up first, and processing can run step by step or as a batch.
If usage data is processed without a matching contract, the system gives an error. From there the user can create or extend a contract.

Features

Feature	Status	At	Evidence
Subscription and Recurring Billing Module	status not stated, demoed	0:06
Contracts and Service Commitments	status not stated, demoed	0:45
Billing Proposals and Schedules	status not stated, demoed	1:25
Deferrals System	status not stated, demoed	2:21
Contract Price Management	status not stated, demoed	3:01
Contract Renewals	status not stated	3:01
Power BI Embedded Reporting	announced	3:01	“later on in the minor release I think it’s 25.2 we will have a popi app which means we will have embedded reporting for” (3:01)
Excel Reports for Subscription Billing	status not stated	3:01
Service Commitment Price Calculation	status not stated, demoed	5:23
Billing Base Period and Rhythm Configuration	status not stated, demoed	5:23
Subscription Order Confirmation Layout	status not stated, demoed	6:40
Deferral Release Batch Job	status not stated, demoed	12:17
Contract Extension with Service Commitments	status not stated, demoed	14:48
Usage-Based Billing Data Import	status not stated, demoed	19:07
Usage Data Processing and Invoice Creation	status not stated, demoed	20:06
Automatic Contract Mapping for Usage Data	status not stated, demoed	21:41

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

table “Customer Contract Deferrals” at 10:43
page “Contract Deferral Release” at 12:37

Not found in BC28-30: table “Customer Contract Deferrals”, page “Contract Deferral Release”.

Quotes

0:24 “we have added a new module um for subscription and for subscription handling for recurring invoicing”
0:45 “there’s a concept of contracts which you would normally expect when you have uh a subscription you have a contract for what it is”
1:25 “you can generate uh billing proposals uh or schedules uh once you have a contract once you have a setup uh you can get”
2:21 “but you in your accounting system you only recognize the the revenue for the individual periods so there is a deferrals um system for”
3:01 “later on in the minor release I think it’s 25.2 we will have a popi app which means we will have embedded reporting for”
5:59 “the billing uh base period is 12 months so it’s annual and the billing rhythm is also uh annual which makes uh sense of”
11:03 “they’re here and um they’re ready to be released is a field whether they are released or not whether they have been moved to”
14:28 “when you post the invoice because it’s an annual uh subscription uh deferral entries are created and you can then release them”
15:25 “you cannot just add any random uh line to a contract you can only add uh service commitments like things that we can uh”
18:06 “in the 25.2 minor we will provide Excel reports so you can get your data out and do analysis and you’ll also uh see”
18:47 “the data for the individual invoices are based uh off of some external data um usually what the End customer assumes it could be”
19:07 “feed that data into the individual invoices for the recurring billing and this is what usage based billing can do”
22:15 “because I process data without having having a contract already uh the system will give me an error and I can just click on”
24:38 “it’s a new module there are some new terminology uh but it supports uh recurring billing for uh Services you can start from an”

Disclaimers in the video

3:01 coming-later: later on in the minor release I think it’s 25.2 we will have a popi app which means we will have embedded reporting for the subscription billing module
18:26 coming-later: in the 25.2 minor we will provide Excel reports and powerbi embed app

Presenters (as heard): Brian Nelson.