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Invoice Grouping overview

Zuora

Invoice Grouping overview

The Invoice Grouping feature provides you the capability of customizing invoice groups to bill subscriptions and order line items based on specific criteria. 

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.

After enabling 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.

Restrictions and limitations

When using the Invoice Grouping feature, keep the following restrictions and limitations in mind:

  • Actions Subscribe and Amend are not supported for creating subscriptions by specifying invoice group numbers at the subscription level.
  • With Orders Harmonization, you can only use Orders API operations to create subscriptions with specified invoice group numbers and change the invoice group numbers. The Orders UI is not available.