Billing documents or budget billing due dates are grouped into invoicing units so that they can be invoiced together and displayed on a bill. The unit is used as the basis for the invoicing processes. 

Prerequisites

Certain parameters in the contract and/or in the billing document control the grouping into invoicing units. 

You can flag contracts as the following in the Joint Invoicing field in the header data:

• Contracts whose documents must be invoiced jointly or that contain a common budget billing plan (mandatory contracts).

The billings or the due budget billing amounts of these contracts (for example electricity, gas and water) always appear together on one bill. 

• Contracts whose documents must be invoiced jointly and whose due budget billing items can be requested together (optional contracts).
• Contracts whose documents must be invoiced individually or whose budget billing amounts are requested on separate bills.

The Joint invoicing field is available in manual billing documents. If you select the field, the manual billing document cannot be invoiced separately.

You can individually process the grouping proposal in event Invoicing Grouping (R403). The event is triggered in invoicing before creation of the bill and after data collection for all possible invoicing objects. 

For more information about the interface description, see the documentation for function module Invoicing Grouping (ISU_SAMPLE_R403).

To override the grouping proposal, assign a grouping key (E_GROUP field) correspondingly to the invoicing orders.

Features

The grouping proposal for Create Bill (see example) takes place according to the following rules:

• Billing documents for contracts that must not be invoiced with other contracts, have a separate invoicing unit.
• There must be at least one billing document for the billing transactions final billing, periodic billing, interim billingor contract changefor all mandatory contracts of an account.

In the case of a move-in or move-out, there is an exception rule: If the billing document is missing for a mandatory contract, the system checks whether there is a final billing or a billing document with billing transaction contract change for another contract of the contract account with the same installation.

• A manual billing document that cannot be invoiced separately, can only be invoiced in the invoicing unit if there is an additional automatically created billing document for the contract.
• A billing document can then generally be invoiced if the preceding billing document was already invoiced or will be invoiced in the same invoicing unit.

The grouping proposal is created without a time reference: This means that the billing periods of the billing documents are not taken into account.

• The grouping proposal for Create Collective Billtakes place according to the following rules:
• The JointInvoicing field in the contract is not taken into account in the collective bill.
• The invoicing orders created from the individual accounts are grouped according to their due date.
• The creation reason for these individual bills is not relevant for the grouping proposal. A collective bill can contain budget billing requests and bills. 
• The grouping proposal for Create Partial Billtakes place according to the following rules:
• Different budget billing items of contracts for a contract account principally lead to separate partial bills (exceptions create late requested budget billing items).
• Contracts whose documents mustbe invoiced jointly have a common budget billing plan. The budget billing plan items are grouped together on a partial bill.
• Contracts whose documents canbe invoiced jointly can have budget billing plans with the same budget billing items. You can request budget billing items together with a partial bill.
• Contracts whose documents must be invoiced separately can have budget billing plans with the same scheduling data. However, separate partial bills are created.

Example

Invoices 1, 2, and 3 must always be billed jointly, because they have been flagged as mandatory contracts. Since there has been no billing for contract 2, the contracts cannot be invoiced yet.

Contracts 4 and 5 can be invoiced. Since contract 5 is flagged as an invoice that must not be invoiced together with other contracts, it must be invoiced separately. The customer receives two bills.

There are billing documents for all contracts. Invoices 1, 2, and 3 must always be invoiced jointly, because they have been flagged as mandatory contracts. Contract 4 has been flagged as an optional contract and is included with contracts 1, 2, and 3 in the same invoicing unit.

Contract 5 is invoiced separately because it has not been flagged as an invoiced that must not be invoiced together with other contracts.