Billing Event Optimization for Capped Budgets

When billing is capped at budget level as explained in Applying a Billing Cap to Individual Budgets, if you release a billing event that exceeds a budget cap PSA takes the following action to ensure that the budget's full amount is billed:

  • Any whole billing event items that do not fit within the cap are moved to a new unreleased billing event.
  • A billing event item that partially fits within the cap is released in full and its related business record is marked as billed. To deal with the overageClosed When a billing event item partially fits within a budget cap, overage is the amount by which the item exceeds the budget amount., PSA generates a negative miscellaneous adjustment for the overage amount and includes it for billing in the same billing event. For example, if a billing event item for 150 exceeds the budget cap by 50, PSA generates a miscellaneous adjustment for -50 and includes it for billing in the same billing event. PSA also generates a positive miscellaneous adjustment for the overage amount (+50 in our example) and includes it in a new unreleased billing event.

The positive miscellaneous adjustment represents unbilled revenue over the value of the budget. How you deal with the positive miscellaneous adjustment will vary depending on your business practices. You might require the customer to increase their budget so that the overage can be billed, you might be able to allocate it to a different budget, or you might be authorized to write it off.

Launching Billing Event Optimization

If PSA is configured as described in Applying a Billing Cap to Individual Budgets, then:

  • When you use the Release quick action to release a single billing event that will cause a budget amount to be exceeded, a message is displayed giving you the option to split and release the billing event. Clicking the Split and Release button invokes billing event optimization. However, if the full budget amount is already billed, an error message is displayed and the billing event cannot be released.

    If an error message explains that PSA first needs to recalculate the value in a budget's Amount Released for Invoicing field, click Recalculate. For more information, see Updating a Budget's Amount Released for Invoicing.

  • When you release billing events from the Billing Events Awaiting Release tab, the release process runs in the background (asynchronously) and billing event optimization happens automatically. If any billing events fail to be released, you are informed via a notification and via email depending on the notification options chosen in the Billing Settings custom setting.

    If a billing event fails to be released because the amount released could not be recalculated, see Updating a Budget's Amount Released for Invoicing.

    Warning:

    We recommend that you always use the Billing Events Awaiting Release tab to release billing events in bulk. This is because the release process always runs asynchronously when invoked from this Lightning page. If you release billing events from Visualforce or Salesforce Classic pages, the release process might run synchronously and billing event optimization will not take place. For more information, see Releasing Multiple Billing Events via Classic or Visualforce Pages.

Different scenarios of what happens when you release a single billing event, or multiple billing events, are illustrated in Releasing Single Billing Events When Billing Is Capped at Budget Level and Releasing Multiple Billing Events When Billing Is Capped at Budget Level.

How PSA Determines Which Billing Event Items to Release

When you release a billing event that exceeds a budget cap, PSA processes the billing event items in the following order:

  1. Firstly, any negative valued billing event items are included for release.
  2. Then billing event items are included for release in the order they are retrieved from the database. Typically this is the order they were created, which will reflect the order in which their business records were created.

Identifying Billing Events and Miscellaneous Adjustments Created by Billing Event Optimization

You can identify billing events and miscellaneous adjustments that were generated automatically as a result of billing event optimization as follows:

  • The Auto-Generated Due to Billing Cap field is selected on billing events.
  • The Budget Cap Adjustment field is selected on miscellaneous adjustments. The positive miscellaneous adjustment is linked to its negative adjustment via the Budget Cap Linked Adjustment lookup.

We recommend you create list views that filter on these fields to have visibility of these records. For information about how to create list views, see the Salesforce Help.

Note:

The Revert Billing process does not revert billing events or delete miscellaneous adjustments that were generated automatically as a result of billing event optimization. You will need to manually revert or delete these records if the billing events that they originated from are reverted.