Navigate the Full Billing Lifecycle
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe common billing scenarios supported by Billing.
- Explain the tools available for invoices.
- Describe payments, credit memos, collections, and write-offs.
- Evaluate dashboards to gain insights on billing performance.
Billing That Adapts to Your Business
Modern businesses don’t follow a one-size-fits-all model. Whether you bill for subscriptions, usage, or complex phased deals, Billing in Revenue Cloud adapts to fit your approach.
Here are some of the billing scenarios it supports.
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Usage-Based Billing: Calculate charges after usage is recorded, so customers are billed for exactly what they use.
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Milestone-Based Billing: Generate invoices when key project milestones are reached, keeping billing aligned with delivery progress.
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Ramp Deals: Adjust billing schedules automatically to reflect changes in pricing or quantity over time.
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Advance or Arrears Billing: Bill customers before or after a service period, based on your cash flow strategy.
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Amendments, Cancellations, and Renewals: Update invoices and schedules automatically when subscriptions change—no manual cleanup required.
These capabilities help your billing processes scale with your business, no matter how complex the deal structure becomes. Now that you've explored how Billing in Revenue Cloud supports flexible billing models, take a look at how it helps you generate and deliver clear, professional invoices.
Deliver the Perfect Invoice
A well-designed invoice is more than a bill—it’s a reflection of your brand and a key customer touchpoint.
Create an invoice, then generate a polished PDF using the out-of-the-box Default Invoice Template, or customize your own. The templates show bundled products and include key details like the due date, taxes, and total amounts. You can also add your company logo to create branded documents that reflect your business identity.
Billing gives you flexible invoicing capabilities that work at any scale.
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Automated Invoice Runs: Schedule recurring invoice batch runs to process large volumes daily, weekly, or monthly.
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On-Demand Invoicing: Generate invoices instantly from the Account or Order record when immediate action is needed.
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External Invoice Ingestion: Import invoices from external systems using the Invoice Ingestion API to unify billing on a single platform.
With email automation, you can send these invoices directly to customers, professionally and on time.
Manage the Post-Invoice Lifecycle
There’s a lot to do after sending an invoice. Here’s how Revenue Cloud helps you manage the full post-invoice lifecycle, from collecting payments to resolving unpaid balances.
Collect Payments and Issue Refunds with Ease
After you send an invoice, you collect payments. Store payment methods securely and run batches to apply payments automatically. If a customer cancels a service or changes their plan after paying, issue a refund in just a few clicks. It’s simple, fast, and keeps the experience smooth for everyone.
Apply Credit Memos with Accuracy
When a customer reduces their order (removes a product or lowers the quantity), Billing automatically converts that change into a credit memo. And you can create standalone credit memos when needed. Apply credits to future invoices or to specific lines on an existing invoice. Automate how credits are applied across multiple invoices for control and consistency.
Manage Overdue Invoices Proactively
To reduce bad debt, use the collections functionality in Billing to monitor unpaid invoices. Create structured collection plans, track follow-up activities, and record customer commitments. Automate reminder emails to follow up on outstanding balances. This keeps your collections process organized and helps maintain healthy cash flow.
Resolve Unpaid Balances with Write-Offs
If you can't collect a balance, use the write-off feature to close it out cleanly. Billing automatically generates a write-off credit memo to bring the invoice balance to zero. This helps your accounting team finalize the record while keeping financial reports accurate and complete.
Next, find out how dashboards help you gain useful insights.
Track Billing Data with Dashboards
To effectively manage your revenue lifecycle, you need clear insights into both individual customer accounts and the overall health of your billing operations. Revenue Cloud provides powerful, consolidated views that empower your teams to track transactions, resolve issues proactively, and make data-driven decisions.
Let's explore the key dashboards you'll use to turn billing data into actionable insights.
Billing Central Dashboard
The Billing Central Dashboard in Revenue Cloud serves as your unified hub to monitor billing operations across your organization. It helps finance and operations teams to gain real-time insight into billing performance, account-level activity, and operational efficiency. In this dashboard, you get two structured tabs: Overview and Invoices.
Overview Tab
On this tab, you get a high-level view of your overall billing performance.
- Start with key financial metrics like annual recurring revenue, monthly recurring revenue, total revenue, net receivables, invoice count, renewal rate, and number of accounts—all in one place.
- Dive into trend charts that show how much revenue has been billed versus what remains unbilled, along with changes in monthly recurring revenue to help you track growth and improve forecasting.
- Explore customer activity through charts that highlight active accounts and Days Sales Outstanding, so you can assess collection timelines and overall billing efficiency.
- Spot issues early with visualizations of tax generation failures, broken down by month, quarter, or year to help your team identify patterns and improve tax processing accuracy.
Invoices Tab
This tab focuses on invoice health and performance so your team can spot exceptions and act quickly.
- View invoice run metrics and status distributions. See how many invoices are in draft, posted, or settled status, and track the volume of disputes, failed invoice batches, and credit memos.
- Check the aging invoices section to see unpaid invoices grouped by overdue time periods, so you can track outstanding balances and prioritize collections.
- Identify invoices that need attention with exception tracking. Monitor invoice failures and disputes, uncover bottlenecks in the generation process, and escalate issues as needed.
- Track credit memo trends to understand how adjustments are affecting recognized revenue and whether credits are being used or left outstanding.
- Check out invoice issues, investigate root causes, and resolve exceptions before they impact cash flow or financial reporting.
Billing Account Overview
For a deep dive into a single customer's financial history, the Billing Account Overview is your command center. It serves as the single source of truth for a customer's billing status and activities, bringing everything together in one place.
From this page, you can:
- Track transactions on an interactive timeline.
- Navigate between tabs for invoices, payments, and credit memos.
- Generate invoices, create credit memos, or suspend billing temporarily.
Billing Operations Console
To monitor the health of your entire billing operation, check out the Billing Operations Console. It provides timely insights that help your team manage processes and troubleshoot issues before they impact your customers or financial reporting.
Here’s what the console enables you to do.
- View key metrics at a glance with summary cards that show total invoices, draft invoices, completed invoice runs, and credit memos.
- Track and manage invoice runs by viewing upcoming billing schedules and past history, with options to create new batch runs or recover failed ones.
- Identify and resolve issues quickly with detailed error logs and a list of failed invoices linked to related records for fast troubleshooting.Easily filter all data by date range or currency to focus on the information that matters most.
Wrap Up
In this module, you explored how Billing in Revenue Cloud transforms orders into revenue through a unified, automated process. By connecting billing to the broader revenue lifecycle, you can automate key steps, reduce errors, and support your business as it grows. With Billing in Revenue Cloud, stay ahead of the pace of business and keep your revenue operations running smoothly!