Bulk Billing / Combining several invoices into one with BCD override?

[Christian Gartmann]

Hi there,

Some of our customers have a few hundred products subscribed with us and
we need to avoid sending a bill for every one of them. We need to know
if this is possible with KillBill.

What it boils down to is this: Is it possible to simply let invoices
accumulate and generate a new invoice out of all these at a certain
point in time without pro rata calculations kicking in?

The thing is: I know there's the Bill Cycle Day on subscription or
account basis, but this would automatically include calculating pro rata
amounts or am I wrong about this?

Regards,
Christian

[Pierre-Alexandre Meyer]

Hi Christian,

You can configure alignments in your catalog (http://docs.killbill.io/0.16/userguide_subscription.html#components-catalog) so that your customers get a single monthly invoice.

With an ACCOUNT alignment for example, all subscriptions will be invoiced on the Bill Cycle Day (BCD) of the account. When creating new subscriptions, there will be indeed a one-time pro-ration to re-align the subscription on the BCD. Further invoices should not get pro-rated anymore.

For example, if the first subscription is created on 2014/12/15 and has a 30-day trial, the BCD will be set automatically to the 14 (2015/01/14 to 2015/02/14 then 2015/02/14 to 2015/03/14, etc.). If a second subscription is created on 2015/02/01 and has a 30-day trial, a pro-ration invoice will be created on 2015/03/03 (for the period 2015/03/03 to 2015/03/14), then the customer will get a single monthly invoice with both line items every month on the 14.

Kill Bill offers the ability to move its internal clock - you could use this feature to test various catalog configurations and see what kind of invoices your customers would get depending on the alignments configured.

Does that help?

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Pierre

[Christian Gartmann]

Hi Pierre,

That's great news!

As it so often goes there are more questions :)

We'd like to give our customers the ability to choose for themselves when they get their invoice. This means we'd like to offer them the option of invoicing every month, every quarter or once a year etc. I read about BCD override which is coming in 0.17. Would that enable us to do this?

Does KB generate a single invoice with all subscribed items combined on BCD or does every subscription get its own invoice? I guess I'm asking about general bulk billing options here.

Is it generally possible to trigger invoicing at a certain point in time only billing those subscriptions that have had at least one subscription cycle completed (read: no pro rata billing, only full subscription amounts at a time of our choosing)?

Thank you in advance.
Christian

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Christian Gartmann
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[Pierre-Alexandre Meyer]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 12:09 AM, Christian Gartmann <c...@cyon.ch> wrote:

We'd like to give our customers the ability to choose for themselves when they get their invoice. This means we'd like to offer them the option of invoicing every month, every quarter or once a year etc. I read about BCD override which is coming in 0.17. Would that enable us to do this?

If you are using an account alignment, you can set the BCD when creating the account. All subscriptions with an account alignment will be invoiced on that day for that account. If you want a single recurring invoice for your customers, that's the route to go.

The  BCD override feature comes in handy in more advanced scenarios, when you want to change the BCD on a per subscription basis. Stéphane just blogged about it, he gives a concrete example at the end of the post which may help: http://killbill.io/blog/bill-cycle-day-overrides/

Note that the billing period is an unrelated concept: it's a feature configurable at the phase level, in a plan. If you have one product, but want different billing periods (e.g. one monthly and one annual), you need to create two plans. Take a look at the "standard-*" plans in this example: https://github.com/killbill/killbill/blob/master/profiles/killbill/src/main/resources/SpyCarAdvanced.xml.

Also, our demo (http://demo.killbill.io) showcases various billing alignments. This wiki page will help you navigate the data: https://github.com/killbill/killbill/wiki/Kill-Bill-Demo

Does KB generate a single invoice with all subscribed items combined on BCD or does every subscription get its own invoice? I guess I'm asking about general bulk billing options here.

When an invoice generation is triggered and multiple subscriptions need to be invoiced, there will be a single invoice, with multiple line items. Take a look at this invoice for instance: http://demo.killbill.io/accounts/ff5ac10c-9f0e-475d-98cd-c3d1bc9ccbed/invoices/ed1c7ccc-207e-4304-b3f8-ab8c7ab97fd0

Is it generally possible to trigger invoicing at a certain point in time only billing those subscriptions that have had at least one subscription cycle completed (read: no pro rata billing, only full subscription amounts at a time of our choosing)?

I'm not sure I fully understand the scenario but:

• You can turn automatic invoicing off for an account using the AUTO_INVOICING_OFF tag. You can then decide when to trigger invoice generation for that account
• You can disable pro-ration by configuring your alignments and policies in the catalog

Maybe at this point it would be easier for you to setup Kill Bill locally, get familiar with the API and experiment with writing your own catalog. We can then help you more specifically with configuring the system to suit your requirements.

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Pierre