Zuora Billing Release 313, November 2021

General availability of Multi-Attribute Pricing charge model for one-time and recurring charges

The Multi-Attribute Pricing charge model for one-time and recurring charges is now generally available to all qualifying Zuora customers.

Zuora can now calculate the price of one-time and recurring charges based on a price formula and attributes, for example, fields, on a billing account, subscription, or both.

See Multi-Attribute Pricing charge model for more information, including known limitations.

General availability of Order Line Items

The Order Line Items feature is now generally available to all Zuora customers. This feature allows you to launch non-subscription and unified monetization business models in Zuora, in addition to subscription business models.

With this feature enabled, you can use the Orders API and UI to send non subscription based transactional charges, such as one-time fees, physical goods, or professional service charges, from quoting through revenue recognition, without the need for a subscription. You can create an order with order line items only or with both order line items and subscriptions. You can also update existing order line items through the Order Line Items API and Orders UI.

See Order Line Items for more information.

Removal of fields from Orders and Order Line Items API and corresponding UI change

To guarantee data consistency in the data pipeline from Order Line Items to Unified Invoicing, the soldTo and soldToData fields on the Order Line Items object have been removed from the following operations. Previously, you could use these fields to specify and access the information about the sold to contact for an order line item.

• Create an order
• Create an order asynchronously
• Preview an order
• Preview an order asynchronously
• Retrieve an order
• List orders
• List orders of a subscription owner
• List orders by subscription number
• List orders of an invoice owner
• Retrieve an order line item
• Update order line items

The following resources codes have also been removed accordingly:

• 588720: nonSubOrderItem.soldToData
• 588721: nonSubOrderItem.soldTo

The Orders UI has been updated accordingly for this field removal. In the Add Order Line Item window, the Sold To Contact section has now been removed. Previously, you could use this section to specify the information about the sold to contact for an order line item when creating the order line item.

After this field removal, when an order line item is created, the sold to contact of an order line item will be set automatically to the sold to contact under the invoice owner account of the order line item. See Create an order line item and Create an order line item with a new subscription for more details. 

General availability of Unified Invoicing

The Unified Invoicing feature is now generally available to all Zuora customers. With Unified Invoicing, you can manage standalone invoices and consolidated invoices to help companies grow subscription and non-subscription revenue by monetizing hybrid offerings within the Zuora ecosystem.

As of Zuora Billing Release 313 (November 2021), new customers will have this feature enabled by default. If you are an existing customer and want to access to the feature, submit a request at Zuora Global Support for Unified Invoicing.

See Unified Invoicing for more information.

Enhancement on tax code configuration to use multiple Connect Tax Engines

You can now set up a tax code to select multiple Connect Tax Engines based on a mapping formula. By associating the tax code with the product you sell in different markets, you can assign a specific Connect Tax Engine to handle tax calculation for a particular market without duplicating the product catalog. This enhancement helps you to sell across borders with efficiency and flexibility.

See Connect Tax Engines and Set up tax codes for more information.

Configurable tax apps now support large billing documents

Zuora has enhanced the OneSource Determination app and the Vertex Tax Connector app to process large billing documents. Both apps now support a maximum of 5,000 taxable line items in a single invoice, credit memo, or debit memo.

See OneSource Determination app and Vertex Tax Connector app for more information.  

Support for displaying correct currency decimal places on all payment and refund pages

All payment and refund pages in the Zuora UI now support displaying the correct number of decimal places for currencies that require more than two decimal places. For example, if a payment is in Kuwaiti dinar, the amount fields display amounts that have three decimal places. 

This update applies to all the Zuora tenants regardless of whether Invoice Settlement is enabled. All payment and refund pages within the Customers, Billing, and Payments navigation are updated. If you have any payment or refund-related items that are in currencies requiring multiple decimal places, these items are displayed with correct decimal places now.

Chase Orbital integration enhancement in resolving transactions stuck in processing

Zuora has enhanced the Chase Paymentech Orbital Gateway integration by supporting idempotency to automatically resolve payments and refunds stuck in the processing status in Zuora. The idempotent retry will be performed hourly on all payments and refunds in the processing status. This improvement will greatly reduce manual efforts of fixing the stuck payments and refunds while avoiding duplicate transactions.

Mandate information for Credit Card payment methods available in the Zuora UI

The following mandate information for Credit Card payment methods is now available in the Zuora UI:

• Mandate ID 
• Mandate Status
• Mandate Reason

This information is presented at the following UI locations:

• Payment detail page > View Detail hover help next to the Payment Method field
• Account detail page > Billing and Payment Info section > View Detail hover help next to the Default Payment Method field
• Account detail page > Electronic Payment Methods section > Credit Card payment method record

Previously, you had to retrieve this information through the Retrieve a payment method API operation, Payment Method data source, or PaymentMethod object in Data Query.

Support for creating Credit Card Reference Transaction payment methods through REST API

You can now use the Create a payment method operation to create Credit Card Reference Transaction payment methods on the applicable payment gateway integrations. The tokenId and secondTokenId fields are available for passing in the tokenized information. 

See API Reference: Billing for more information.

New field available in the Create a payment REST API

A newly introduced field called accountNumber  is now available in the request body of the Create a payment operation. You can specify a customer account number with this field. Previously, only accountId was available for specifying the customer account identification.

See API Reference: Billing for more information.

Enhancements on unknown errors in API responses

Unknown errors that occurred in the following scenarios have been enhanced with more effective error codes and messages.

See REST API Changelog and SOAP API Version History for more information.

If you have any questions about compatibility with these changes, submit a request at Zuora Global Support.

Multiple access to notification histories 

Both standard and custom event based notification histories are now exposed through Data Query, Data Source Exports, and AQuA API to facilitate reporting. Common use cases include:

• Report on all emails that have failed to be sent, by event, customer name, or date
• Report on all failed callouts, by event, consumer URL, or date

With this enhancement, notification histories can be accessed through the following approaches:

• Querying one of the following tables through Data Query:
  • notificationhistorycallout
  • notificationhistoryemail

      See Available tables for Data Query for more information.

• Creating a data source export for the following data sources through Zuora Reporting:
  • Notification History - Callout
  • Notification History - Email

      See Data source availability for a list of all supported data sources.

• Querying through AQuA API, where the query statement is based against the following tables:
  • CalloutHistory
  • EmailHistory

  See the following articles for more information:

  • AQuA Post query
  • Data sources and objects for Export ZOQL

General availability of Custom Events 

The Custom Events feature is now generally available to all Zuora customers. You can build your own custom events and create notifications triggered by these events. 
Previously, you had to submit a request at Zuora Global Support to enable this feature.

See Custom events for more information.

Upcoming Renewal email notifications can be sent up to 180 days prior to renewal date 

Zuora can now send email notifications for the Upcoming Renewal event as early as 180 days before your customer’s subscription renewal date. In line with this enhancement, when you configure a notification for the Upcoming Renewal event, the value range for the How Many Days Before field is updated to 1 - 180. Previously, this range was 1 - 90.