You are here:
Troubleshooting Proration Issues
When you’re working with proration in CPQ and Billing, review some important guidelines to ensure that your proration values align and deliver expected results. (Salesforce Billing Managed Package)
When you invoice a quote, you typically want the invoice’s total to align with the quote and order’s total. Misalignment between quote and invoice balances happens for three reasons.
- Rounding when an invoice line contains a fraction of a cent
- Differences between CPQ and Billing proration settings
- Changing any billing-date-related order field or order product field, such as billing day of month or billing frequency
Let’s see how you can manage each.
Rounding for Fractional Currency Values
If Salesforce Billing encounters a repeating decimal when dividing an order total into invoices over a set of billing periods, it rounds the repeating value to two decimal places and then adds any remaining balances in the final periods. During rounding, the third decimal is used to determine whether the second decimal is rounded up or down. The last invoice then has a different balance to account the previous rounding, which ensures that the order product is still billed in its entirety. This process can't be changed or overwritten. Here are two examples.
- $100 billed monthly for 12 months
- Rounded down because 8.333 is closest to 8.33
- Invoice balance for first 11 months: $8.33
- Invoice balance for 12th month: $8.37
- $104 billed monthly for 12 months
- Rounded up because 8.666 is closest to 8.67
- Invoice balance for first 11 months: $8.67
- Invoice balance for 12th month: $8.63
CPQ and Billing Proration Settings
CPQ and Billing package settings each contain several options for proration calculation formulas. Different combinations of the settings may produce variations in how your balances are distributed between orders and invoices. We recommend two ways as the most effective options for aligning proration between the packages.
- Option 1
- CPQ: Proration Day of Month (Calendar Monthly + Daily)
- Billing: Proration Day of Month
For more information on using the Proration Day of Month field, review Align CPQ and Billing Cancellation Based on Billing Periods.
For a line-level review of proration differences and alignment, review Aligning Proration Between CPQ and Billing.
- Option 2
- CPQ: Monthly + Daily
- Billing: Monthly (CPQ Formula)
This option is helpful for companies that align the effective date of their amendments to the beginning of the billing term.
Changing Date-Related Order or Order Product Fields
Salesforce Billing proration formulas evaluate a set of order and order product fields to calculate proration periods, which are then used to calculate invoice balances. If you change the default values of any of these fields, your quote and invoice totals can misalign, even if you aligned your CPQ and Billing proration settings.
Changing important billing fields on orders and order products can cause your quote and invoice balances to misalign, even if you aligned your CPQ and Billing proration settings.
For example, consider a quote line for a monthly MDM Subscription with a list price of $12,000 for a one-year subscription term. A sales rep negotiates a shortened term of 04/23/21 through 09/30/21 with a customer and then adds it to their quote. The prorated list price is $5,263.01.
You’ve set up automation that sets the order’s billing day of month to 1 by default. As Salesforce Billing invoices the order, your invoice lines for each month’s invoice have the following values.
- 04/23–04/30: $266.67
- 05/01–05/31: $1,000
- 06/01–06/30: $1,000
- 07/01–07/31: $1,000
- 08/01–08/31: $1,000
- 09/01–09/30: $996.34
However, let’s say you change the billing day of month to 15 after the first invoice and before the second invoice. While your total billed is the same, this change affects how the total amount is split up between each invoice.
- 04/23–04/30: $266.67
- 05/01–05/14: $460.27
- 05/15–6/14: $1,000
- 06/15–07/14: $1,000
- 07/15–08/14: $1,000
- 08/15–09/14: $1,000
- 09/15–09/30: $536.07
Changing your order’s start date also affects how your invoice total is divided among billing periods. Let’s return to our MDM subscription with a term of 04/23/21 through 09/30/21, where the billing day of month is 1. If you change the order’s start date to 05/23/21, Salesforce pushes the end date to 10/30/21. However, May has 31 days, as opposed to 30 in April, so the first billing period covers one extra day. Let’s look at the new periods. Also remember that Salesforce CPQ adjusts the end date out so that the order covers the same amount of time.
- 05/23–05/31: $295.89
- 06/01–06/30: $1,000
- 07/01–07/31: $1,000
- 08/01–08/31: $1,000
- 09/01–09/31: $1,000
- 10/01–10/31: $967.12
