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.

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.

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.

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.