Overview
Zuora allows you to group your customers into billing batches (from Batch1 to Batch20). Billing batches are specified on the customer account under the Billing and Payment Info section. All customer accounts are defaulted to Batch1 when created unless you indicate a different billing batch upon creation. Billing batches can be updated at any time to a different batch number, but only one billing batch can be assigned to a customer account at a time. This article discusses how billing batches can be used to both organize your customer accounts and optimize your billing and payment operations.
Solution
Creating custom batches for your billing and payment processing can be extremely helpful, convenient and often times necessary.
Types of Batches
Account Type
- Group your customers by vertical (for example: B2B, B2C)
- Group by region (for example: EMEA, Americas)
- Group by business unit (for example: Emerging, Enterprise, SMB, Strategic)
Non-Billing or No Revenue Accounts
Accounts which are not billing or have no revenue can be grouped into a batch that is never processed in a billing or payment run. These accounts may include:
- Cancelled Accounts
Assign a certain batch to canceled customer accounts which does not get processed in bill runs or payment runs.
- Free Trial Accounts
It is best practice to handle endless free trials outside of Zuora since they are not generating any revenue for your company. However, if you have free trial accounts, you can group them together in a batch that does not get processed in bill runs or payment runs.
- Test Accounts
Testing should be done primarily in your API Sandbox tenant to ensure your testing data does not skew your production data when you run your reports. If your company has created some test accounts in your production tenant, we advise you to put these test accounts in their own billing batch to ensure they do not get picked up in billing and payment runs along with real customer accounts.
Parent/Child Accounts
You may want to group all related customers into their own batch (for example, companies with subsidiaries or partner accounts), so you may perform a bill run or payment run for the whole organization.
Payment Method
You can batch customers by their payment method (credit card customers vs direct debit customers vs ACH customers).
Batches Help You Optimize Billing & Payment Operations
Billing batches allow you to invoice and process payments for a group of customers together. For example, you may want to schedule a bill run for your B2B customers every first of the month, while performing daily bill runs to invoice your B2C customers.
Batching by payment method allows you to be flexible around the invoice target dates for direct debit customers, as an example. Some customers paying by direct debit need to be invoiced early because the invoice serves as advanced notification that payment will be collected on specified date (Invoice Due Date). Such advanced notification may be required as part of mandate regulations. Batching by payment method is also helpful if you want to track payments for credit card customers vs ACH customers in separate payment runs since ACH payments have a longer settlement period. Processing payments for ACH customers separately makes it easier to reconcile ACH payments.
When executing a bill run or payment run, you can choose the batch of customers you want to execute the bill run or payment run for. If you have a large number of customer accounts, dividing them up in batches allows you to more quickly process individual batches rather than waiting for a very large batch to complete.
How to Use Billing Batches
1. Create your customer account and select a Billing Batch under the Billing and Payment Term section of the customer account. Select a specific batch number from Batch1 to Bach20.
2. To create a bill run for a specific batch, go to Billing Operations > Bill Runs > click the New Bill Run button, and select you desired batch under the Specific Batch option.
3. The steps for creating a payment run for a specific batch is the same as a bill run except you begin by going to Payment Operations > Payment Runs > click the New Payment Run button > select you desired batch under the Multiple Customer Accounts, Customers in Batch option.
4. If you want to process all customers, in a bill run choose the option to process all batches and in a payment run choose the option to process all customer accounts.
We also recommend reviewing the following article: How Do I segment Customers?
- Customer Account Dates: Bill Cycle Day
- The bill cycle day (BCD), located in the Billing and Payment Term section of the customer account page, determines the day of the month that the customer will be billed.
- Selecting and Signing up for a Payment Gateway
- How do I bill for recurring charges now and bill for usage later?
- How do I bill in advance?
- How do I choose a payment gateway?
- How do I control when Zuora will authorize the Payment Method?
- How do I fix a payment stuck in Processing status?
- How do I redirect the email notifications for our scheduled billing and payment runs to a different email address?
- How do I segment customers?
- How do I use an invoice number to find a payment?
- How do I use batches?
- How does changing the bill cycle day on a customer account impact billing for that account?
Comments