Consolidating Invoices Using Consolidation Rules

You can run the consolidation process using consolidation rules.

When you run consolidation using a consolidation rule, the process first retrieves all the sales invoices that match the rule's invoice filter criteria and have an invoice date earlier than or equal to the invoice date that you selected. The retrieved sales invoices are then grouped using the rule's grouping methods, and are consolidated.

The following conditions apply to consolidation using consolidation rules:

  • You must have the correct permissions assigned. For more information, see Enabling the Sales Invoice Consolidation Feature
  • Only accounts that have the Consolidate Sales Invoice checkbox selected on the Account Extension object are included in the consolidation process.
  • You can only run consolidation using a single rule at a time.
  • For the consolidation process to run properly, the consolidation rule must have an invoice filter and a invoice grouping method linked to it.
  • 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.

To run consolidation using a consolidation rule:

  1. Click the Invoice Consolidation Rules tab.
  2. Open the required consolidation rule.
  3. Click Run Consolidation Rule. The Run Consolidation Rule page displays.
  4. If required, change the Invoice Date. This is used as the invoice date for the new consolidated invoices. If you change the date, you must select a date that is in an open or future period. Only sales invoices with a date earlier than or equal to this date are selected for consolidation. It is set to today's date by default.
  5. Click Run. Details of the process run are displayed. You can click the link to view the progress and process log messages. For more information, see Process Runs.

The consolidation process runs in the background. You are notified by email once the process has completed.

Note:
No process runs are created if there are no sales invoices for invoice consolidation to process.

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were grouped together are moved to a new consolidated sales invoice and the status of the original invoices is set to "Superseded".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

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