Zuora Release 2023.10.R1
Welcome to the release notes for Zuora Release 2023.10.R1. This article is a consolidated page of release notes for the following Zuora products:
For the latest release notes of Zuora Revenue, see Zuora Revenue release notes.
Release schedule
To receive notifications about releases, join Release Notifications in Zuora Community. For the planned release schedule, see Zuora Release Management.
Zuora Billing
Product Catalog
Offers and Price Book Items back in Beta phase
The Offers and Price Book Items features previously delivered for early adopters are now in the Beta phase.
Orders and Subscriptions
Batch Update Price available for early adopters
You can update the charge price of multiple subscriptions at once through the Batch Update Price drop-down button on the Subscriptions page. You can also view the price update history through the same button. For more information, see Batch update price.
We will release this flow only in Sandbox environments, and it will not be deployed to Production environments until further notice.
Set default reason code for credit memos generated through Delivery Adjustment
You can now set a default reason code for all credit memos generated through delivery adjustment creation.
By default, the reason code is empty. You must set the default reason code before creating any delivery adjustment; otherwise, the "Create a delivery adjustment" API operation will fail. For more information, see Create Delivery Adjustments.
Enhanced Discount
Through the Enhanced Discount feature, you can apply a discount to charges according to the discount duration more accurately. You can also define the discount duration more flexibly by adopting the new start date policy and end date policy of a discount and specify the apply-to scope of the discount, when adding a discount through the Create an order API operation. This feature is only available to the Orders Harmonization and Orders tenant. For more information, see Manage Enhanced Discount and Enhanced Discount use cases.
The Enhanced Discount feature is in the Early Adopter phase. We are actively soliciting feedback from a small set of early adopters before releasing it as generally available.
Enhancement to reinvented subscription details page
You can now monitor the entire lifecycle of a subscription in the Subscription Lifecycle & MRR Trending dashboard. Access this dashboard by clicking the subscription Lifecycle link on the reinvented subscription details page.
This feature is only available to the Orders Harmonization and Orders tenants where Order UI is enabled.
For more information, see View details of subscriptions through the reinvented UI.
This feature is only available in Sandbox environments.
Usage and Rating
Save bill run results in database
You can now store the results of the bill preview run in the database. The options available to store the results are CSV and database.
For more information, see Create a billing preview run API operation.
Invoicing and Tax
Multiple Currencies available for early adopters
You can now use the Multiple Currencies feature to create transactions in any currency, regardless of your customer’s default currency, including:
- Specify a currency when creating a subscription.
- Specify a currency when creating a standalone invoice, credit memo, or debit memo.
- Specify a currency when creating an unapplied payment.
This feature allows you to offer a more customized and seamless experience to your customers, who can choose the currency that suits them best. With the Multiple Currencies feature enabled, you can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Currently, this feature is available only through the REST API operations.
To enable the Multiple Currencies feature, you must have the following features enabled:
For more information about the Multiple Currencies feature, see Multiple Currencies.
The Multiple Currencies feature is is generally available. You can enable this feature in Sandbox environments with the self-serve interface. For more information, see Enable billing features by yourself. If you want to enable this feature in your Production environments, contact your Zuora account team for assistance.
E-Invoicing available for early adopters
You can now use the E-Invoicing feature to streamline your electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) processes. E-Invoicing facilitates the seamless exchange of billing documents in an integrated electronic format between suppliers and buyers.
The E-Invoicing feature offers prebuilt partner connectors for e-invoicing solutions to ensure that your billing documents meet compliance standards in supported countries. Currently, the supported partner is Sovos, which provides compliance support for the country of India. For more information about Sovos, see Sovos eInvoice.
For more information about this feature, see E-Invoicing.
The E-Invoicing feature provides the following capabilities:
E-invoicing with Sovos is generally available. E-invoicing with Avalara and E-invoicing with PEPPOL are in the Early Adopter phase. We are actively soliciting feedback from a small set of early adopters before releasing them as generally available. If you want to join this early adopter program, submit a request at Zuora Global Support.
Support for preventing over credit for Delivery Pricing charges
For charges with the Delivery Pricing charge model, you can now use a billing setting to prevent your total credit amount from exceeding the total invoice amount. The credit amount might be sourced from the following credit memos:
- Ad-hoc credit memos created from the corresponding invoice
- Credit memos generated due to the delivery adjustments on the subscription
- Credit memos generated by the billing engine due to subscription cancellation, product removal, suspension, resumption, and so on
The credit validation behaviors for Delivery Pricing charges depend on the option of the Available to credit validation for credit memos rule.
- If you set this rule to Header-level only, Zuora only validates that the total credit amount does not exceed the total invoice amount for the whole invoice.
- If you set this rule to Header and Item-level, Zuora validates that the total credit amount does not exceed the total invoice amount for each invoice item.
For more information, see Prevent over credit for Delivery Pricing charge.
REST API enhancement on retrieving invoice items
When using the following operations, you can now also retrieve data about taxation items with custom fields:
- List all items of an invoice operation to query all items of a specified invoice
- List all taxation items of an invoice item operation to query all taxation items of a specified invoice item
Previously, the API operations returned custom fields for invoice items, but not for taxation items.
Reinvented bill run details page available in Production environments by default
You can now access the reinvented bill run details page in all Sandbox environments by default.
The redesigned bill run details page has a modern look and feel, along with several enhancements and functionalities. See the following key highlights:
- The page is organized into tabs for improved navigation and ease of use.
- Rebilling failed accounts becomes simpler and more efficient.
- Summary section: This section provides a clear overview of the results, making it easy to find critical information.
- Associated Bill Runs section: All instances of executed bill runs for a scheduled bill run are consolidated on a central page. You can easily track processed accounts and billing documents.
- History section: A comprehensive bill run history is included, which shows the timeline of user operations and bill run status changes.
For both Sandbox and Production environments, the reinvented bill run details page has been enabled by default. If you want to switch back to the old bill run details page, click the more options icon, and then click Back to the Original Bill Run View.
UI enhancements for external tax engines in Zuora platform (Sandbox only)
In Zuora platform, you can now create or modify tax partner integrations all in one place instead of needing to use Zuora Marketplace. We have made the following enhancements to the UI:
- Auth Types including None, Taxamo-Private-Token, HMAC-SovosTaxware, and BearerId are now classified as Private Token.
- Sabrix is now called OneSource SOAP and Vertex is called Vertex SOAP.
- SureTax REST and SOAP have been split into two respective engines.
- New Liquid template troubleshooting tooling includes basic syntax validation and auto-complete.
This feature is in the Early Adopter phase. To join this early adopter program, submit a request at Zuora Global Support. The UI enhancements for external tax engines will only be released in Sandbox environments, and they will not be deployed to Production environments until further notice.
Zuora Payments
Payments
Support for sharing NTI in payments on different gateways
We now support using a Network Transaction ID (NTI) generated by card networks, such as Visa and Mastercard, in payment processing on different payment gateways. For example, there is an Adyen 2.0 gateway instance and a Stripe v2 gateway instance on your tenant. An NTI generated by Visa is stored on a card that was successfully used with the Adyen gateway instance, while no NTI is stored from a transaction with the Stripe gateway instance. With this feature enabled, when processing a payment through the Stripe gateway instance, Zuora will use the NTI stored from the transaction initiated through Adyen.
Note that this feature is not universally supported across all payment gateway integrations. For a list of integrations that support this feature, see Overview of support for stored credential transactions.
To enable this feature, submit a request at Zuora Global Support.
Enhancement in resolving transactions stuck in processing for PayPal Express Checkout
The PayPal Express Checkout payment gateway integration has been enhanced to support idempotency to automatically resolve payments and referenced refunds stuck in the processing status in Zuora. This improvement will reduce manual efforts of fixing the stuck payments and refunds while avoiding duplicate transactions.
For more information, see Electronic payment processing.
Enhancement to ValidiFi account validation service
If you have enabled the ValidiFi account validation service, you can now configure the threshold of the AVC level for approving the creation of ACH payment methods in Zuora. When creating an ACH payment method, if the risk level of the result code returned from the gateway is higher than the risk level of the threshold, the creation of the ACH payment method will fail.
For more information, see Enable the support for ValidiFi account validation for ACH.
Update on authentication to Worldline Global Collect Gateway Reconciliation service
We have updated the authentication method for connecting to the Gateway Reconciliation service of Worldline Global Collect. The new method is password-free and SSH-based. You can download the public SSH key file from Zuora Knowledge Center and provide it to Worldline to configure it in your merchant account.
For more information, see Overview of Worldline Global Collect gateway integration.
Finance
Trial Balance run status available in UI
You can now view the status of the Trial Balance run. If you want to access this feature, submit a request at Zuora Global Support.
For more information, see View Trial Balance run status.
Zuora Central Platform
Events and Notifications
Support for muting System Health notifications
You can now use the following event parameters to mute System Health notifications for a designated duration after the notifications have been triggered a certain number of times:
- Mute Active
- Mute Limit
- Mute Hour
The parameters in the preceding list are supported only in System Health events, except for the following System Health events related to custom object record usage:
- Custom Object Records High Usage
- Custom Object Records Max Usage
For example, you can create a notification for the API Failures event with the following settings and Zuora will mute this notification for one hour after triggering it eight times:
- Mute Active: true
- Mute Limit: 8
- Mute Hour: 1
Additional details provided for bounced email status
Additional details, including bounce reasons, are now available for bounced emails sent from the default email server or Advanced SMTP server.
You can find detailed information on bounced email status in the following ways:
- The Email History tab on the Setup Profiles, Notifications and Email Templates page.
- The Failures tab on the Notifications System Health dashboard. For more information, see Notifications dashboard.
- Exported data from the
NotificationHistoryEmail
orNotificationHistoryEmailEvent
table through Data Query. - Exported data from the Notification History - Email data source through Data Source Exports.
- The List email notification histories API operation.
Support for creating custom events for custom objects
You can now create custom events for custom objects in your tenant. You can configure the event trigger with conditions such as the creation, modification, or deletion of custom object records, together with other rules for field values.
To create custom events for custom objects, take one of the following ways:
- Manage custom events through the UI. For more information, see Create a custom event.
- Use the Create an event trigger API operation.
For example, a custom event with the following condition will be triggered when a custom object record is created for the Vehicle
custom object and the vehicle price (Price__c
) is greater than 5000:
changeType == 'INSERT' && default__vehicle.Price__c >= 5000.0
For more information, see Custom events and Custom objects.
Zuora Secure Data Share for Snowflake
Enhancement on custom object names in Snowflake Secure Share
To keep consistent with the custom object names in Data Query, we have updated the prefix for custom object names in Snowflake Secure Share from default_
to default__
, which contains two underscores after the change.
Here is an example:
Before | Now |
---|---|
default_vehicle |
default__vehicle |
Workflow
New Workflow type UI Action available
A new Workflow type UI Action is available from this release onwards. The UI Action workflow type allows the Workflow admins to quickly install a button that will enable Billing users to trigger a workflow process within a Zuora Billing page without requiring additional admin access.
Following are the key attributes of the UI Action workflow type:
- The button can be installed on a specific page in Zuora Billing.
- Ability to label button(s).
- A one-click setup where a button will automatically be installed on the selected page.
For more information, see Configure the settings of a workflow version.
For a demo video, see the Zuora Workflow Community.
Enhanced Approvals task with Zuora Inbox
The Manual Approval task is enhanced with the following new delivery methods:
- Zuora Inbox - Allows you to manage approvals in one dedicated UI interface as opposed to several different locations in the Workflow application.
- Email - Allows managing approval trigger requests directly through email.
- Slack and WebEx - Sends approval requests through the collaboration tools.
For more information, see Manual: Approval.
For a demo video, see the Zuora Workflow Community.
Zuora Connector for Salesforce CRM
Failure retry function available for the Zuora Connector for Salesforce CRM System Health dashboard
Zuora Connector for Salesforce CRM System Health dashboard now supports the failure retry function. You can now retry failed records during real-time synchronization.
For more information, see Failure retry function.
Central Sandbox
Enhancements to central and developer sandbox
You can now schedule your next refresh for the central and developer sandbox in the production environment.
For more information, see Refresh Central or Developer Sandbox in Production.
REST API
For the detailed API documentation, see API Reference.
For a summary of REST API updates and documentation updates in the Zuora API Reference, see 2023 API Changelog.
Quickstart API
From 2022.09.R1, the Quickstart API is available to you if you have the Orders (or Order Harmonization) and Invoice Settlement features enabled in your tenant. The QuickstartAPI allows new integrators to swiftly integrate with Zuora, and it supports essential business use cases.
For the detailed Quickstart API documentation, see Quickstart API Reference.
For a summary of REST API updates and documentation updates in the Quickstart API Reference, see Quickstart API Changelog.
SOAP API
Current WSDL version: 137
For information about how to check your version and download the latest version. see Zuora WSDL.
SOAP API change history
For a summary of updates made to the SOAP API in recent Zuora releases, see Zuora SOAP API Version History.