Billing Essentials

Browse through this collection of terms, key objects, and key concepts. This collection is designed to give Salesforce admins, sales reps, and developers a clear and consistent understanding of billing concepts and helps them navigate the Billing landscape.

Accounting Period: A specific time frame for which a company prepares its financial statements. For example, a month, quarter, or a year. It's a fundamental concept in accounting, as it dictates how and when revenue and expenses are recognized.
Actual Tax: The actual tax amount that's calculated for posted invoices.
Automated Clearing House (ACH): Facilitate the use of the Automated Clearing House (ACH) payment method for your customers by using third-party payment gateways.
Bankers' Automated Clearing Services (BACS): Facilitate the use of the Bankers' Automated Clearing Services (BACS) payment method for your customers by using third-party payment gateways.
Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS): Facilitate the use of the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) payment method for your customers by using third-party payment gateways.
Billing App: A unified app that houses all billing related objects, such as Accounts, Billing Schedule Groups, and Invoices, grouped together so that you can manage and execute the end-to-end billing process.
Billing Arrangement: Represents the arrangement for invoicing a transaction's billing amount to one or more accounts. The arrangement specifies whether the total amount will be invoiced to the owning account or a different billing account, or whether the invoices should be split among multiple billing accounts. For each assigned account, user can select a corresponding Billing Profile to fetch its billing preferences.
Billing Arrangement Line: Represents the billing account, billing profile, and the percentage of billing amount to be invoiced. Each billing arrangement line will result in a separate invoice addressed to the selected billing account.
Billing Day of Month: Indicates the day of the month when customers are billed. This is applicable for products that have recurring billing.
Billing Frequency: The frequency at which customers are billed. Currently, it's derived from pricing term or pricing frequency.
Billing Milestone Plan: A Billing Milestone Plan defines how a milestone-based product is billed and derived from a milestone billing treatment. It specifies billing rules and details unique to the product's Billing Schedule, ensuring invoices are generated when predefined milestones are completed, aligning payments with delivery or project progress milestones.
Billing Milestone Plan Item: A Billing Milestone Plan Item represents an individual milestone within a Billing Milestone Plan. It specifies the milestone's details, including its name, completion criteria, associated amount, and billing trigger.
Billing Profile: A collection of customer or contact-level billing preferences, such as Bill Day of Month (BDOM), Payment Terms, and Billing Address, grouped into a single profile for consistent and streamlined invoicing.
Billing Period Item: Represents one billing period for a subscription. The billing period item is used to pass billing information to an invoice line item in Revenue Cloud Billing.
Billing Policy: Represents a group of billing treatments that define the rules for how to invoice a customer for an order item. Billing policies are related to products. When an order is created, the billing policy is automatically applied to the order items. When an order is activated, Billing assigns a billing treatment to each order item based on the values in the BillingTreatmentSelection field. ‌Revenue Cloud Billing uses ‌billing treatment to create billing schedules.
Billing Schedule: Stores the order item information used in the invoicing process. When you activate an order, Revenue Cloud Billing creates a billing schedule for each order item in an order.
Billing Schedule Group: Represents a consolidated view of all billing schedules related to the order items generated from one asset, including new orders and amendment orders.
Bill to Address: The address to which the customer is to be billed.
Bill to Contact: The contact that’s to be billed.
Billing Operations Console: A dashboard used by the Billing Operations user to track invoices, credits, invoice runs, and errors related to billing.
Billing Start Month: Represents the month that the billing cycle starts from for a subscription.
Billing Treatment: Defines how Billing bills an order item. The Exclude From Billing field controls whether the order item is invoiced. Child billing treatment items control how much of the order item's balance is invoiced for each invoice across the subscription lifecycle. Billing treatments are assigned to order items based on the parent billing policy's Billing Treatment Selection field.
Billing Treatment Item: A billing treatment item defines how the order item's total amount is distributed into billing schedules during the order item lifecycle. In the Revenue Cloud Billing, billing treatments must have only one billing treatment item, so that the billing treatment item covers 100% of the order item's total value.
Billing Type: Determines the type of billing: Advance or Arrears. Advance billing refers to when customers are billed for an upcoming period in the current Billing Day Of Month (BDOM). Arrears billing occurs when customers are billed for a period that’s already completed.
Closing Balance: A closing balance is the amount of money in an account at the end of a specific accounting period, such as a day, month, quarter, or year. It represents the final total after all financial transactions (credits and debits) have been recorded for that period.
Collection Agent Console: A dashboard or interface used by collections agents to track overdue accounts, monitor collection plan progress, interact with customers, and take necessary recovery actions.
Collection Plan: Details about the outstanding amounts of financial accounts, billing accounts, contacts, or cases that are related to individuals or an organization.
Collection Plan Item: An instance of a collection plan.
Corporate Currency: The primary currency used by a company for financial reporting and consolidation.
Credit Memo: Represents a document that’s used to reduce the amount that a buyer owes a seller under the terms of an earlier invoice.
Credit Memo apply: Allow accounts receivable or customer service representatives to adjust an outstanding invoice balance or to adjust or correct any errors in an invoice by creating and applying a credit memo against the invoice. The invoice has already been processed and sent to a customer.
Debit Memo: A debit memo represents the document used to charge an additional amount to a buyer by a seller.
Debit Memo Line: A debit memo line represents the additional charge amount that the buyer must pay for the product, service, or debit memo line tax that is related to the debit memo. It’s the actual line item indicating the charge for a debit memo.
Dispute: Represents the details of a billing dispute that involves one invoice and one or more disputed invoice lines. The details include the disputed amount, the approved amount, and the dispute type, subtype and status.
Dispute Item: Represents a specific invoice line or charge that’s being disputed. The details include the total transaction amount, the transaction date, the disputed amount, the reason and status of the dispute.
Email Delivery Preference Template: The default document template that’s used to generate the body of the invoice email that’s sent to customers.
Estimated Tax: The tax amount that's estimated for draft invoices.
Flexible Tax Contract: Extend the standard tax contract with custom metadata types. You can add any standard or custom attributes from an invoice or invoice line to the attributes that are already included in a tax contract.
FX Gains & Losses (Realized): Realized foreign exchange gains and losses are the actual profits or losses that result from a change in foreign currency exchange rates for transactions that have been settled.
FX Gains & Losses (Unrealized): Unrealized foreign exchange gains and losses are potential profits or losses on a company's financial statements that result from a change in foreign currency exchange rates for transactions that are yet to be settled.
Gap Reconciliation: The Sequence Gap Reconciliation object represents a missing sequence value identified during reconciliation, which can be used later to ensure there are no gaps in the sequence policy numbers.
General Ledger Account: Use general ledger accounts to categorize billing transactions and report them in financial statements.
General Ledger Account Assignment Rule: General ledger account assignment rules define the rules for assigning accurate general ledger accounts to transaction journals and establish criteria to define which specific transactions the rules apply to.
General Ledger Account Summary: General Ledger Accounting Period Summary is a junction object between a general ledger account and a legal entity accounting period. This object stores information about the total credit amount, total debit amount, opening balance, and closing balance of a general ledger account for a specific legal entity accounting period.
Journal Entry: The dual journal entry system is the foundational principle for recording financial transactions, ensuring every event impacts at least two accounts with equal debits and credits. In Billing, you can automatically generate dual transaction journals, that represent a credit entry and a debit entry, based on the configuration for the transaction type in the general ledger account assignment rule.
Invoice Amount: The total amount or value of the invoice.
Invoice Balance: The pending payable amount by the customer.
Invoice Batch Run: A specific run record created for the invoice batch scheduler.
Invoice Batch Scheduler: A batch scheduler to create invoices in bulk.
Invoice Line: Represents the amount that a buyer must pay for a product, service, or fee. Invoice lines are created based on the amount of an order line.
Invoice Recovery: Use the Invoice Run Recovery API to recover records associated with a failed invoice run. Recovery is required only when billing schedules remain in the Processing, Void In Progress, or Error status.
Legal Entity: Legal entities represent the way a structure is organized. For example, a company could create two legal entities to represent their American and APAC branches. Each legal entity record relates to a billing, tax, revenue recognition, and general ledger treatment for an order product or order product consumption schedule.
Legal Entity Accounting Period: While accounting periods define overall timeframes, legal entity accounting periods represent the intersection of a specific legal entity and a particular accounting period.
Next Billing Date: Represents the upcoming date when the customer is set to be billed.
Next Charge Date: Represents the upcoming date when the customer is charged for the subscription.
Next Run Date: Determines the upcoming date when an invoice batch run must be initiated.
Opening Balance: An opening balance is the amount of money or the value of an account at the start of a new accounting period.
Payment Batch Run: A batch processing job that processes payments in Billing. During a payment batch run, all payment schedules that meet the specified criteria are processed and the corresponding payment records are created. These payments are then applied to invoices or invoice lines.
Payment Gateway: A connection to an external payment gateway that's used to collect payments for posted invoices.
Payment Gateway Adapter: Payment gateway adapters represent the bridge between your payments platform in Salesforce and an external payment gateway.
Payment Schedule: Details about a set of payments that a customer wants to collect at different times for a certain record. A schedule contains one or more payment schedule items, where each item represents one payment to be processed. Each item in the schedule can have different payment configuration fields, such as payment methods, payment dates, and payment accounts.
Payment Schedule Item: Details about a payment to be processed. Each schedule item can have different payment configuration fields, such as payment methods, payment dates, and payment accounts. When a payment scheduler launches a payment run, the run evaluates active payment schedule items, and picks them up for payment processing if they match the scheduler’s payment criteria.
Payment Schedule Policy: When a payment schedule and payment schedule items are automatically created after invoices are posted, the payment schedule policy determines the amount of the payment schedule, the number of payment schedule items that must be created, and their amount and processing dates.
Period Boundary: The period boundary is a method to set the Billing Day Of Month (BDOM) for billing.
Save Payment Method: Collect one-time or scheduled recurring payments by securely saving the payment methods of your customers, rather than manually entering payment method details each time a payment is processed.
Sequence Policy: The Sequence Policy object represents the configuration of rules and parameters for generating unique, sequential numbers for records. This object stores settings such as numbering patterns, prefixes, suffixes, sequence start numbers, increment values, and filter criteria to ensure accurate and compliant numbering.
Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA): Facilitate the use of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payment method for your customers by using third-party payment gateways.
Tax Contract: A tax contract is an agreement between a buyer and a seller about the tax calculation for invoices.
Taxes Credited: Taxes credited, more commonly known as a tax credit, is a direct reduction of the tax amount. Calculate tax credits based on the original invoice ID and date in the tax request.
Taxes Debited: The tax amount that's debited from a customer.
Tax Lines: Represents the specific tax amounts calculated for each invoice line.
Tax Rate: Represents information about the tax rate for a transaction, that's determined by the applicable tax code and country.
Tax Treatment: A tax treatment contains details about how Salesforce and external engines calculate taxes, and the tax engine to use for tax calculation.
Taxes Voided: The tax amount that's cancelled.

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