Invoice Grouping overview

Feature overview

Zuora Billing allows you to group and generate multiple invoices by account, or consolidate invoices across multiple subscriptions to ensure that you can bill your customers efficiently and flexibly. You can use any of the following approaches to group subscriptions into different invoices during the billing process.

Accounts
By default, Zuora Billing groups subscriptions with different customer accounts as invoice owners into separate invoices by account.
Invoice Subscription Separately
For the same customer account, you can enable the Invoice Subscription Separately setting for the subscriptions if you want to generate invoices separately.
Billing attributes at the subscription level or order line item level
If you have the Flexible Billing Attributes feature enabled, you can specify different billing attributes for subscriptions and order line items (OLIs) so that they are automatically grouped into separate invoices. The billing attributes at the subscription level include bill-to contacts, payment terms, invoice templates, sequence sets, sold-to contacts, and currency. The billing attributes at the OLI level include bill-to contacts and sold-to contacts.
Invoice group numbers
With the Invoice Grouping feature, you can use the invoiceGroupNumber field on the Subscription and Order Line Item objects to define your own criteria for invoice grouping within a single account.

With the Invoice Grouping feature, you can flexibly customize invoice groups, empowering you to bill subscriptions and order line items based on specific criteria. For the same order or account, you can separate invoices for subscriptions and order line items by using custom criteria such as purchase order numbers or ship-to locations.

To achieve this goal, a field called invoiceGroupNumber is introduced to the Subscription and Order Line Item objects, accepting a string of at most 255 characters. For the same account, Zuora can bill subscriptions and order line items separately by using distinct invoice group numbers. Each customer account can have multiple invoice groups. For different customer accounts, invoice group numbers do not need to be unique. For more information, see Create invoice groups for subscriptions or order line items.

Among a group of subscriptions that have the same invoice group number, if the Invoice The Subscription Separately setting is selected on some subscriptions in the group, the setting has a higher priority. Separate invoices are generated for the subscriptions on which the Invoice The Subscription Separately setting is selected.

Object and field changes introduced in Invoice Grouping

The REST API is enhanced to support the specific billing attributes for grouping subscriptions and order line items in invoices. The following table lists the object and field changes introduced in the Invoice Grouping feature.

Base object	Field/Related object	Access approaches
Order Action	invoiceGroupNumber clearingExistingsoldToContact	REST API
Orders	invoiceGroupNumber clearingExistingsoldToContact	REST API
Order Line Item	invoiceGroupNumber	REST API
Subscription	invoiceGroupNumber	REST API
Credit Memo	invoiceGroupNumber	REST API
Debit Memo	invoiceGroupNumber	REST API
Invoice	invoiceGroupNumber	REST API

Currently, this feature is accessible only through the REST API. For a summary of REST API updates specific to this feature, see the "API updates specific to the Invoice Grouping feature" section in API Changelog (January 26, 2024).

Working with other features

The following table lists how the Invoice Grouping feature works with other features.

Feature	Compatibility
Flexible Billing Attributes	The Invoice Grouping feature depends on the Flexible Billing Attributes feature. After enabling the Flexible Billing Attributes feature, you can have the Invoice Grouping feature enabled automatically.
Orders or Orders Harmonization	The following order actions support the Invoice Grouping feature. Create Subscription order action You can specify different invoice group numbers for subscriptions under an account during the create subscription order action. For the same customer account, subscriptions with the same invoice group number are billed into one separate invoice. Owner Transfer order action You can transfer the subscription ownership or invoice ownership of a subscription from one account to another account for subscriptions with specified invoice group numbers. Renewal order action You can renew subscriptions with specified invoice group numbers Terms And Conditions order action You can change the terms and conditions for subscriptions with specified invoice group numbers.
Invoice Settlement	Invoice Settlement supports the Invoice Grouping feature. You can retrieve the invoice group number associated with a credit or debit memo through the REST API. Meanwhile, Invoice Adjustment and Invoice Item Adjustment also support the Invoice Grouping feature.
Billing Schedule	Billing Schedule supports the Invoice Grouping feature. You can create and manage invoice schedules for subscriptions with specified invoice group numbers. For the same account, all subscriptions with the same invoice group number and billed into one single invoice.
Zuora Payments	Zuora Payments supports the Invoice Grouping feature.
Zuora Finance	Zuora Finance supports the Invoice Grouping feature.
Data Query	Data Query temporarily does not support the Invoice Grouping feature.
Zuora 360+	Zuora 360+ does not support synchronizing invoice group number fields on the following objects to Salesforce in real time. Subscription Order Order Line Item Invoice Credit Memo Debit Memo
Order to Revenue	The Order to Revenue feature supports the Invoice Grouping feature.
Billing - Revenue Integration	The Billing - Revenue Integration feature does not support the Invoice Grouping feature.

Restriction and limitation

When using the Invoice Grouping feature, keep the following restriction and limitation in mind:

Actions Subscribe and Amend are not supported for creating subscriptions by specifying invoice group numbers at the subscription level.