What are billing groups for?

Billing Groups are a way to organize your business and contain various configurations. Multiple Billing Groups should be created if in your business you want to handle the billing of different products, customer groups, or brands in different ways. See below for a list of configurations attached to a billing Group.

Use billing groups to bundle multiple items from different contracts, orders, or business units of a customer. This allows you to invoice multiple line items created under one customer in one document. The document can contain both debit and credit items. Billing groups help reduce the number of documents your customer receives if, for example, they have several contracts or a usage-based contract that creates new items each time the customer creates a new usage.

Due to the billing group management, multiple business segments and locales can be combined into one billing document. The items will be grouped and listed as separate objects on the respective document.

This means that even if you offer multiple products and services that are divided into different business segments, you can still combine all of their line items into a single billing document for your customer, as long as the business segments belong to the same billing group.

Billing Group Configuration

To configure a Billing Group using the Nitrobox Webportal, navigate to: Configuration > Business Model > Billing Groups > Billing Group Overview

Configured directly with a Billing Group

• Business Segments
• Locale configuration
  • The locale config determines, which countries and locations you intend to support. You can additionally configure, which languages are valid for you in which location as well as a default (used when no language is otherwise provided) or fallback (used when a language is provided that doesn't match any configured for the locale) languages.
• Splitting Configuration
  • The splitting configuration defines which items will be included in one invoice and which will be split into several invoices. The checkboxes that are fixed are mandatory splitting parameters.
    For example, the check mark for "Customer" means that data from two customers will never be merged into one invoice. Likewise, data with different currencies will never be listed on one invoice. Thus, different customers and currencies will inevitably lead to a split.
    You can configure if different Contracts for example can be billed on one document if all other parameters match. Same goes for the business segment and the performance location.
• Internal vs External Billing
  • Internal: NBX is entirely responsible for creating billing documents. That means the Document Number, Document Date, etc is determined by NBX logic and can't be specified for single business transactions.
    This is required to use Nitrobox Order and Contract management functionality.
  • External: The billing occurs in the client system and complete documents are sent to Nitrobox. In this case, the document date and -number can be provided to be used by Nitrobox.
    This is required to use the Nitrobox Document API.
  • Note: You can have a Billing Group for Contracts and Orders using "Internal billing" and another for "External billing", should your business require both approaches.
• Option Price Determination
  • Determines, which Contract location will be used to determine the Option Price. See also Options
• Deposit Invoice Creation
  • Determines, if an Order that contains "agreed deposits" will issue a deposit invoice and when.
• Document Date Determination
  • Determines the logic by which we set the document date for contracts. “Document Creation” uses the day when the document was created (so if there is a delay the document date would be later). “Billing Period” always sets the date to the last or first day of the billing period (depending on the plan's billing timing).

Can optionally be configured or overwrite global tenant configuration

• Documents Configuration
  • Document Templates
  • Document Number
• Plans
  • always exists for a single Billing Group, see Plans