New Features and Enhancements in Billing Central Winter 2024

The following new features have been introduced in the Winter 2024 release of Billing Central.

If you are upgrading from a previous version, see Upgrading to Billing Central Winter 2024. This provides a summary of the items that have been added for each feature and details of any required upgrade steps.

Before you upgrade to Winter 2024, we recommend you also check the new features and enhancements information for each incremental release. This information for the two most recent Billing Central releases can be found here:

Changes to Validations and Field Updates

The following changes have been made to improve Billing Central's usability.

Immediate Update of Billed Data on Contract Lines

In previous releases, when a billing document was completed the Billed To and Total Billed fields on related contract lines were not updated until the Foundations scheduled job for message delivery ran. This meant that there might be a delay before the billed data was updated.

Now the Billed To and Total Billed fields are immediately updated during the billing document completion process. If the immediate update fails for any reason, the fields are updated when the message delivery job next runs.

If you want to disable this immediate update behavior, see Don't Update Billed Data during Complete.

Notes:

If you are upgrading and the Billed To and Total Billed fields are blank on existing contract lines because the message delivery job was not configured to run in your org, when the fields are immediately updated in Winter 24 the Total Billed value will be incorrect for part-billed contracts. This is because the fields are updated for new billing activity only, they are not updated to include historic billing activity. This could result in a contract line's Total Billed value being updated to a negative amount if you convert an invoice to a credit note.

Billed contract lines are validated differently from unbilled contract lines. Some functions check the Billed To and Total Billed fields to determine if the contract line has been billed. Once a contract line is billed, some fields are locked on change requests to prevent them from being edited. For a list of these fields, see Fields Locked on Billed Contract Lines.

Pricing Structures do not Prevent Price Amendment

In previous releases, you could not use the Amend Prices feature if a contract included a contract line with a pricing structure. In this situation Billing Central displayed an error and did not create a change request for price amendment.

Now if there are other lines on the contract eligible for price amendment, Billing Central creates a change request with the changes to those lines but does not change the line with the pricing structure. A warning message is displayed explaining that lines with pricing structures are not amended.

Ensuring Billing Data Integrity

In previous releases, Billing Central protected some contract line fields from being edited on active contracts by including them in the Active Contract Line Locked Fields field set. Users could only edit these fields on an active contract by raising a change request.

From Winter 2024, Billing Central maintains an internal list of contract line fields that are locked on active contracts to prevent them from being edited. This reduces the risk of the fields becoming editable because they are not within the field set.

For more information, including a list of the locked fields and what to do if your business has customizations that take responsibility for maintaining billing data integrity, see Protecting Contract Line Fields from Edits When a Contract Is Active.

Avoiding Gaps in Billing Schedules

Validation has been added to prevent users from extending the end date of a "Recurring Fixed" contract line that ends partway through a billing period if it has been billed up to its end date. This is because no billing schedule would be created for the unbilled part of the billing period in which the line previously ended, meaning that there would be a gap in the line's billing schedules.

If your business has customizations that validate against gaps in billing schedules, it is possible to disable this validation. For more information, see Allow Fully Billed Lines to be Extended.

Excluding Contract Lines from Renewal

You can mark a contract line to be excluded from renewal by selecting its Exclude from Renewal checkbox. When you renew the contract, any contract lines with the Exclude from Renewal checkbox selected are omitted from the renewal.

By default Billing Central automatically selects the Exclude from Renewal checkbox when:

You add a new one-off line to a contract.
You use the Amend Prices feature and a contract line is ended or canceled in order to apply the new unit price.
You use the End Contract feature and a contract line is canceled because it does not start until after the contract's end date.

You can deselect the Exclude from Renewal checkbox on a contract line if it was selected automatically by Billing Central.

For more information, including how you can stop Billing Central from selecting the Exclude from Renewal checkbox automatically, see Excluding Contract Lines from Renewal.

Rounding during Price Amendment

When you amend prices on a contract by a percentage, you can choose how rounding is applied to the new unit price.

The rounding scale options are:

No Rounding - The new unit price is not rounded.
Whole Number - The new unit price is rounded to the nearest whole number using Salesforce's HALF-UP rounding rule.
Currency Decimal Places - The new unit price is rounded to the number of decimal places specified in the Salesforce currency definition, using Salesforce's HALF-UP rounding rule.

The rounding scale selected by default is determined by the Default Rounding Mode for Amend Prices field in the Billing Central Settings custom setting. For more information, see Rounding Unit Prices during Price Amendment.

Automate Applying Change Requests

You can now create change requests for active contracts automatically by creating a Salesforce flow to call the Create Change Requests invocable action.

You could use this action to enable users to add service credits to an active contract. For example:

You could design a screen flow that uses a button on the billing contract header to open a screen where the user enters contract line information such as product, value, start and end dates, and description. On saving the information, Billing Central creates a change request for the active contract, then the flow adds a new contract line on the change request using the information provided by the user.
You could design a record-triggered flow that uses two custom fields on the billing contract header: a custom field to hold the credit value and a custom checkbox to flag that the credit value should be applied. Including these two fields in the billing contract list view allows the user to easily enter credit values on multiple contracts, and by selecting the "apply" checkbox on multiple contracts and saving the changes in the list view a record-triggered flow is triggered to create change requests for all the updated contracts.

In both these scenarios, you can include the Apply Change Requests Apex action in the flow to automatically apply the change request.

For more information, see Custom Action to Create Change Requests.

Note:

Due to platform restrictions, Certinia cannot include sample flows with the Billing Central package but you might have access to a sample flow if you are receiving the Accelerate build. For ideas about how you might design a Salesforce flow to create change requests, see Sample Flow to Apply Service Credit via a Screen Flow and Sample Flow to Apply Service Credit via a Record-Triggered Flow. For information about how to create Salesforce flows, please refer to the Salesforce Help.

Create Change Requests in Bulk via The ContractsService API

The CreateChangeRequests method has been added to allow change requests to be created in bulk via the API. The method creates change requests for the contract IDs provided, and returns a map of change request ID by contract ID.

For more information, see the Billing Central API Developer Reference.

Automate Calculating Next Billing Date

You can now calculate a contract's next billing date by creating a Salesforce flow to call the Calculate Next Billing Dates invocable action. The action calculates a contract's next billing date as the billing date of its next unbilled billing period.

You could include this action in a flow that creates change requests for service credits to ensure that the credit amount is included on a billing document as soon as possible.

For more information about using this action, see Custom Action to Calculate Next Billing Dates.

Note:

Due to platform restrictions, Certinia cannot include sample flows with the Billing Central package but you might have access to a sample flow if you are receiving the Accelerate build. For ideas about how you might design a Salesforce flow that includes calculating the next billing date, see Sample Flow to Apply Service Credit via a Screen Flow and Sample Flow to Apply Service Credit via a Record-Triggered Flow. For information about how to create Salesforce flows, please refer to the Salesforce Help.

Calculate Next Billing Date via The BillingSchedulesService API

The calculateNextBillDates method has been added to calculate the date on which a given contract will be next billed. If the given contract will never be billed, a `null` date is returned.

For more information, see the Billing Central API Developer Reference.

Notifications to the UI When Background Processes Complete

You can now choose whether Billing Central sends background process notifications to users via Salesforce notifications. When the Receive Process Notifications by SF field is selected, users are alerted to notifications via the bell icon.

The Receive Process Notifications by SF field is located in Billing Central's Background Process Settings custom setting.

Fixes

Fixes are listed on the Known Issues page of the Certinia Community. You can access this page from the Community Support Hub. For a brief description of the issues that have been fixed in this version of Billing Central, see the relevant section of the Known Issues page.

Release Content

We want to help you find all of the information and resources that you need to use our products effectively.

In-App Guidance

Certinia in-app guidance uses Salesforce user engagement features to deliver Certinia content, such as tutorials and walkthroughs, directly from our products.

In this release, we've updated our in-app guidance. For more information, see Billing Central In-App Guidance.

Certinia Trailhead

If you want to learn more about the new features in this release, see the ERP Cloud - Winter 2024 Release Highlights Certinia Trailhead module. This module will guide you through the new features in ERP Cloud.

Certinia Help Is Now Available from help.certinia.com

You can now access the Certinia Help and Technical Reference from help.certinia.com.

We have updated all the Help links included in Billing Central Winter 2024. For more information, see Certinia Help URL.