Explore Billing Features and Roles

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the billing capabilities that power invoicing, payments, and reporting.
Identify key roles involved in managing and maintaining billing operations.

Fancy Capabilities

Billing in Revenue Cloud can seem complex, but behind the scenes, it's driven by some foundational features. They control how and when invoices are generated, how taxes and payments are applied, and how financial records are tracked for reporting. In this unit, let’s go over these capabilities and find out how they connect directly to invoicing, payments, and reporting.

Invoicing Criteria

Invoicing criteria define the rules for when and how products are invoiced. Each product in the catalog has a billing policy that determines whether it should be billed or excluded from billing. If billed, it specifies whether to bill in advance or in arrears, and guides how charges are processed during invoicing.

A billing treatment outlines the overall billing schedule, such as billing monthly or based on project milestones. The billing treatment contains one or more billing treatment items, which set the specific timing and amount for each billing event. By default, billing is set to 100% of the transaction amount. For milestone-based billing, the billing treatment items are defined separately and linked to specific milestones that determine when billing events occur.

For instance, you can bill 50% of a training service upfront and 50% after delivery by setting up two treatment items.

Together, billing policies, treatments, and treatment items provide flexible control over how each product is billed, which ensures that invoicing aligns with business models and customer agreements.

Tax Policy

Tax treatments integrate with external tax engines to pull real-time rates, or apply logic based on the customer’s location or tax jurisdiction. This structure allows businesses to tailor tax handling for different regions or product types.

Tax policies work with tax treatments to decide how tax gets calculated on your invoices. A product can be taxed at 18% in one region while being tax-exempt in another. When you assign a tax policy to an order product, it carries through to the billing schedule that follows. Each tax policy needs at least one tax treatment, which spells out the exact rules—like whether to apply a fixed rate or pull rates from an external tax engine.

By assigning the appropriate tax policy to each order, businesses can handle these variations automatically. This approach supports accurate, location-sensitive tax calculations and ensures compliance with regional tax regulations—without relying on manual adjustments.

Billing Profiles

Billing profiles store customer-specific preferences like addresses, bill-to contact, and payment terms. These details are automatically pulled in when invoices are generated.

For example, a customer who prefers invoices sent to a specific contact at their Singapore headquarters can have this preference saved in their billing profile, so every invoice reflects the correct details.

Invoice Previews

Invoice previews let teams review upcoming charges before finalizing an invoice. This helps avoid billing errors and gives finance teams an opportunity to verify amounts, discounts, and dates.

For instance, a 10% loyalty discount is applied before sending an annual renewal invoice. For more information, see Preview Invoices.

Billing Schedules and Billing Schedule Groups

Billing schedules define how a product is billed over time. Billing schedule groups combine multiple schedules under a single order product for easier management. A subscription product that includes monthly service fees and annual support charges can use separate billing schedules for each, grouped together to simplify tracking and invoicing.

Suspend and Resume Billing

You can pause billing temporarily at the account or transaction level, during events such as payment issues or customer-requested holds. When resumed, billing picks up where it left off.

So if a customer places their subscription on hold for two months, the system suspends billing during that time and automatically adjusts the billing schedule when resumed.

Payment Terms

Payment terms set the payment due date for an invoice. They help teams manage collections and forecast cash flow more accurately.

Let’s say you set a 60-day payment window for your customer. Setting that term ensures each invoice reflects the correct due date without manual updates.

Legal Entities

A legal entity represents a business unit or operating jurisdiction that defines tax registration details, currencies, and reporting requirements. It provides the regulatory context for applying taxes and ensures compliance with local rules. Legal entities work alongside tax policies to determine which rules apply and how to report them.

For example, a company that operates in both the US and UK defines separate legal entities for each region, enabling the system to apply the correct local tax handling and financial reporting for every transaction.

Financial Accounting

Revenue Cloud includes accounting features to ensure bookkeeping meets standards set by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). These features organize billing data so it’s easier to review, report, and reconcile your accounts receivable. Accounts receivable subledgering is supported only with the Financial Accounting feature. Here are a few terms related to financial accounting.

Accounting period refers to a defined time span—such as a month, quarter, or year—during which a company records and reports its financial activity. It’s a key accounting concept that determines when revenue and expenses are recorded.
Chart of accounts (COA) is a structured list of all the financial accounts an organization uses. It serves as a comprehensive directory for categorizing and tracking financial transactions. Like a filing system, it labels each transaction by type, such as revenue, tax, or discounts, making financial reports easier to interpret.
Transaction journals capture every billing entry using double-entry bookkeeping, showing both sides of a financial event (like revenue earned and cash received).

With Salesforce Advanced Currency Management, you can view corporate currency equivalents on billing transactions alongside the transaction currency. For example, consider an enterprise headquartered in the US with legal entities in Germany. When invoicing a customer in Germany in EUR for €10,000, the system records the transaction in EUR, and the journal entries are made to the Transaction journal in EUR for the February accounting period.

The system also captures the corporate currency equivalents in USD on the record, which is later used for calculating Foreign Exchange Gain/Loss amounts (realized amounts during invoice settlement and unrealized amounts during accounting period closure using this exchange rate and amounts in USD).

Meet the Team

Smooth billing operations rely on people accessing the right parts of the system. Each role plays a distinct part in configuring, maintaining, or acting on billing data and decisions. These roles are supported by prebuilt permission sets in Revenue Cloud, which you can clone and customize for your needs.

Let’s look at who does what—and how their work connects to the building blocks of Billing in Revenue Cloud.

Key Roles	Responsibilities
Billing Admin	Configures billing policies, legal entities, and schedule logic for new offerings. Think of the Billing Admin as the architect of the billing setup.
Billing Specialist	Schedules invoice runs and oversees invoicing operations to ensure timely and accurate billing.
Billing Customer Service Rep	Handles customer inquiries related to billing and payments. Maintains positive customer relationships by resolving issues quickly and professionally.
Credit Memo Operations User	Issues credits for canceled or amended invoices that update billing records and trigger journal entries.
Tax Admin	Sets up tax policies and treatments by region, product, or legal entity.
Accounts Receivable Admin	Manages accounting periods, journal entries, and financial reporting.
Billing Collection and Recovery Specialist	Manages overdue invoices, initiates collection plans, and tracks follow-up activities to recover outstanding payments.
Payments Admin	Adds and configures new payment methods and gateways to support secure and flexible payment processing.
Payment Operations User	Applies payments to invoices, manages refunds, and handles payment adjustments to maintain accurate payment records.

Next Up

Now that you've identified the key players and building blocks, you're ready to see how everything connects across the full billing lifecycle.

In the next unit, find out how to handle milestone scenarios, send invoices, manage the post-invoice lifecycle, and track performance.

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