Automatic Creation of Draft Credit Notes - Important Information

Since Summer 2022, whenever you apply a change request Billing Central creates a draft credit note automatically if your edits in the change request result in the customer being entitled to a refund.

Note that:

• If you have enabled the Allow End Contract Line Before Billed To field in the Billing Central Settings custom setting, applying a change request which includes an edit to move a contract line item's end date to before its Billed To date will result in a draft credit note being created if the line is now worth less than was billed. For more information, see Early Termination of Contracts and Contract Line Items.
• If you have enabled the End Contract via Change Request field in the Billing Central Settings custom setting, ending a contract will create a change request which might result in a draft credit note being created if the customer is entitled to a refund. For more information, see Ending Contracts via Change Requests.
  Note:

  If you do not enable the End Contract via Change Request field, the End Contract process will not create a change request and therefore credit notes will not be created automatically when customers are entitled to a refund. Users must then create credit notes manually if a refund is required.

For more information about how and when Billing Central creates draft credit notes automatically, see Automatic Creation of Draft Credit Notes When Applying Change Requests.

Permissions Required for Automatic Credit Note Creation

Billing Central can only create a draft credit note if the user who applies the change request has the following permission sets:

• Billing Central - Billing Document - Basic
• Billing Central - Contract - Apply Change Request
• Billing Central - Contract - End
• FDN Common Concepts

Users must also have read access to all the fields required to create credit notes including fields used for any non-standard analysis mappings from contracts to billing documents. If a user does not have access to all the fields required to create the credit note, the change request will be created but not applied and an error message will be displayed.

Sharing rules must not prevent users from seeing all the billing documents related to the contract they are crediting. This is because Billing Central calculates credit amounts based on the billing documents that are visible to the current user.

Volume Considerations

Billing Central can create draft credit notes automatically for billing contracts with up to approximately 500 contract line items. The exact number of supported line items varies depending on several factors including whether any custom processes or integrations are being used, the number of analysis items and custom fields being used, and Salesforce limits.

If a billing contract is too large for Billing Central to handle, a CPU timeout might occur during processing.

Here are some tips for working around this issue if it occurs.

• Before applying a change request or ending a contract via a change request, delete any unbilled billing schedules and draft billing documents belonging to the contract.
• If you want to raise a change request to end some contract line items early, edit the lines in batches via a series of change requests instead of trying to edit all the lines in one change request.
• If you want to end a contract via a change request, first raise a normal change request to end some contract line items early (for example, end half the contract line items this way). After that change request is applied, end the whole contract via a change request.