New pricing agreements that you make with your customers may affect billing documents that have already been processed and settled. If a new pricing agreement is effective before the pricing date of the billing documents, you can perform retroactive billing to call up a list of these documents and reevaluate them with the new price. You can then create additional billing documents to settle any differences.
Retroactive billing is a special billing function often used in scheduling agreement processing .
With the retroactive billing function, you can:
Call up a list of documents affected by price changes
Trigger the system to create the necessary retroactive billing documents directly from the list
Create credit or debit memos directly
Review any errors in a log
Simulate the retroactive billing process for any document
How does Retroactive Billing work?
The following graphic shows a simple example of retroactive billing:
In this example, the system calculates the difference between the net value of the invoice ($100) and today's net value based on the new price ($90). It then creates a credit memo with the net value of $10 to be credited to the customer.
Primary and Secondary Documents
The system calculates retroactive billing values for
primary
documents. It can use
secondary
documents to help calculate this value.
Invoices are always
primary
documents.
Other billing documents, such as debit or credit memos, can be
primary
or
secondary
documents. This depends on the
order reason
entered in the billing document.
For more information on how the order reason is used to control primary and secondary documents, see Order Reason in Retroactive Billing . This section will also provide a more detailed example of how retroactive billing works.
Primary Documents
Primary documents are:
Invoices
Credit memos that refer to returns
Credit and debit memos in which you have entered the relevant order reason
You can also assign an order reason to a memo request which then passes it along to the referenced credit or debit memo.
Secondary Documents
Secondary documents are the following billing documents in which you have entered the relevant order reason:
Credit and debit memo requests
Credit and debit memos
The system displays such a document only when it has been created with reference to the invoice and when the currencies in both documents match.
Caution
If you create a credit or debit memo (or memo request) without reference to an invoice, you will not be able to see in the retroactive billing list if the invoice has already been billed retroactively.
When you create a credit or debit memo request which is relevant for retroactive billing as a secondary document, the system will use it to calculate retroactive billing for the referenced document.
Note
The system does not take into account whether or not a request has been rejected, partially billed, or billed using another pricing procedure. Also, it does not take into account any changes in the payer, sold-to party, sales organization, billing date, or material.