Consolidating Billing Documents Using Consolidation Rules

You can run the consolidation process using consolidation rules. This is useful if you do not want to manually select the billing documents to be consolidated.

When you run consolidation using a consolidation rule, Billing Central first retrieves all the billing documents that match the rule's record filter. All the billing documents with the status "Draft" are then grouped using the rule's grouping method, and are consolidated.

You can run consolidation using a single rule at a time or using multiple rules at the same time. If you run multiple rules, each rule starts a separate background process.

Notes:

• For the consolidation process to run properly, the consolidation rule must have a record filter and a consolidation grouping method linked to it.
• When running consolidation using multiple rules, you must ensure that the underlying record filters do not retrieve the same billing documents. Otherwise, the processes might fail.
• You cannot run multiple consolidation processes using the same consolidation rule at the same time. You must wait for the existing process to finish before you can run a new one. Otherwise, an error displays.

Consolidating Using Multiple Rules

To run consolidation using multiple consolidation rules:

1. Click the Consolidation Rules tab.
2. Select the required consolidation rules.
3. Click Run Consolidation. If one or more consolidation rules are invalid, the Run Consolidation page displays a list of errors. You must fix these errors or exclude the invalid rules before you can continue. If all the rules are valid, the page displays each consolidation rule you selected and the number of billing documents that will be retrieved by the filter and submitted for consolidation. It also displays an estimated number of billing documents after running the consolidation. This includes both the consolidated documents and the documents that will remain unconsolidated because they can't be grouped with other documents.
4. If necessary, change the Document Date. It is set to today's date by default.
   The Document Due Date is calculated automatically as follows:
   • For an invoice, it is calculated from credit terms. Credit terms held on account take precedence over credit terms held on company. If none exist on either account or company the due date is set to the document date.
   • For a credit note, it is set to the document date.
5. Click Run Consolidation.

The consolidation runs in the background. A dedicated background process is created for each rule. Depending on the way in which your Salesforce org is configured, you might receive a notification or an email when each background job is complete. For details on how to monitor the processes, see Monitoring the Progress of a Background Process.

Once a process finishes, the line items of billing documents that were grouped together are moved to a new consolidated document and the status of the original documents is set to "Superseded". Depending on the line limit set in Consolidation Settings, billing documents with the same field values might result in multiple consolidated billing documents.

Where fields (such as Customer Reference) have the same value on all the original billing documents, the value is used on the consolidated billing document. If an optional field has different values for multiple documents, the field is left blank on the consolidated billing document. When consolidating billing documents, checkboxes that contain conflicting values have the default value of the checkbox on the consolidated document.

Consolidating Using a Single Rule

To run consolidation using a single consolidation rule:

1. Click the Consolidation Rules tab.
2. Open the required consolidation rule.
3. Click Run Consolidation. The Run Consolidation page displays the number of billing documents that will be retrieved by the filter and submitted for consolidation. It also displays an estimated number of billing documents after running the consolidation. This includes both the consolidated documents and the documents that will remain unconsolidated because they can't be grouped with other documents.
4. If necessary, change the Document Date. It is set to today's date by default.
   The Document Due Date is calculated automatically as follows:
   • For an invoice, it is calculated from credit terms. Credit terms held on account take precedence over credit terms held on company. If none exist on either account or company the due date is set to the document date.
   • For a credit note, it is set to the document date.
5. Click Run Consolidation.

The consolidation runs as a background process. Depending on the way in which your Salesforce org is configured, you might receive a notification or an email when the background job is complete. For details on how to monitor the process, see Monitoring the Progress of a Background Process.

Once the process finishes, the line items of billing documents that were grouped together are moved to a new consolidated document and the status of the original documents is set to "Superseded". Depending on the line limit set in Consolidation Settings, billing documents with the same field values might result in multiple consolidated billing documents.

Where fields (such as Customer Reference) have the same value on all the original billing documents, the value is used on the consolidated billing document. If an optional field has different values for multiple documents, the field is left blank on the consolidated billing document. When consolidating billing documents, checkboxes that contain conflicting values have the default value of the checkbox on the consolidated document.