Billing Plans

You use billing plans to schedule individual dates for billing for a product or service, independent of the product delivery or provision of the service. You can either bill the same amount at regular intervals (periodic billing plan) or bill different amounts at specified dates that have been predefined (milestone billing plan).

Integration

The standard system contains the following billing plans:

Periodic billing plans, designed mainly for use in contracts in the following areas (not sales contracts):
- Service, for example, in maintenance contracts
- Leasing, for example, in leasing contracts
- Intellectual Property Management, for example, in contracts for the rights to show films
Milestone billing plans, designed mainly for use in sales quotations and sales orders, as well as for sales items in service contracts
These can be used for large, long-term, or costly projects.

You can see information about valid billing plans in the Billing Plan assignment block in the relevant business transaction. This assignment block is only available for business transactions with a transaction type for which billing plans are activated in Customizing.

Prerequisites

You have made the necessary settings for billing plans in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management under Start of the navigation path Transactions Next navigation step Basic Settings Billing Plan End of the navigation path .

Note Note

You cannot use a billing plan created in SAP ERP in SAP CRM. Nor can you use or an SAP CRM billing plan in SAP ERP .

End of the note.

Features

Assignment of Billing Plans to Business Transactions

You can decide whether one billing plan should be valid for all the items in a business transaction (valid at header level), or whether different billing plans are required for the individual transaction items (valid at item level).

Generation of Billing Request Items

The billing plan contains a list of dates. For each of these dates up to the horizon, the system generates a billing request item. Each billing request item triggers the system to create a billing document when certain conditions have been fulfilled.

The system determines the dates for billing request items based on general date information, for example, the start and end date of a contract. The general date information can either be copied from the header of the business transaction or from the billing plan type. The system uses the following rules to generate billing request items:

The settlement period
The billing date

You can choose whether the billing request items are all generated immediately, or should be generated in groups.

Recommendation

We recommend that you group billing request items if the billing plan is valid for a long time period or contains a large number of billing request items. For more information about grouping billing request items, see Customizing for Customer Relationship Management, under Start of the navigation path Transactions Next navigation step Basic Settings Billing Plan Business Add-Ins for the Billing Plan BAdI: Define Groupings of Billing Request Items End of the navigation path .

End of the recommendation.

Pricing and Invoice Creation

Once the date has been reached on which the next billing request item is due, the system sends an invoice to the customer for the product or service. The system runs pricing for the item using either condition records or financial mathematics, depending on your customizing settings.

Note Note

You can apply a billing block to any of the billing request items so that the system does not automatically send an invoice on that date. This might be necessary, for example, if a customer has complained about a product or service and you don't want to send them an invoice at that point in time, or if a certain milestone has not been reached.

End of the note.