If you have Flexible Billing Attributes enabled, the invoice generation behavior changes.

With the feature enabled, you can specify billing attributes, including bill-to contacts and payment terms, and so on, at the subscription and order line item level. Subsequently, invoices are generated based on the billing attributes on the corresponding subscription and order line item level.

The following billing attributes are used to group invoice items into separate invoices:

• Bill To Contact
• Currency
• Payment Term
• Invoice Template
• Sequence Set
• Communication Profile

The following billing attributes won't affect invoice grouping. Instead, they'll be saved on the invoice items by inheriting them from the related subscription or order line item.

• Sold To Contact
• Ship To Contact

Invoice generation follows the following rules:

• The latest billing attributes of subscriptions and order line items are used for generating invoices.
• If you disable the Invoice the Subscription Separately setting, only one draft invoice is generated for the subscriptions that have the same billing attributes. Multiple draft invoices are allowed if they are generated from the subscriptions or order line items with different billing attributes.
• If you enable the Invoice the Subscription Separately setting, separate invoices are generated for subscriptions, regardless of billing attributes.
• You cannot update the flexible billing attributes on a subscription if a draft invoice exists. To make the changes, you must post the draft invoice first, and then you can update the subscription.

Assume that you have a customer account with the account number being A0001 and two bill-to contacts: Steve America and Ray Lockman.

The default bill-to contact of the account is Steve America, and the default payment term is Net 30.

The following table lists the invoice generation behavior changes if you have the Flexible Billing Attributes feature enabled.

Read the following sections to understand how the Flexible Billing Attributes feature works in common subscription management and invoice generation scenarios.

For more use case information, see Common use cases of Flexible Billing Attributes.

Multiple invoices are generated according to different bill-to contacts and payment terms

If the two subscriptions have different bill-to contacts and different payment terms, you can generate two invoices, one for each subscription. The bill-to contacts and payment terms of the generated invoices inherit those of the corresponding subscription. See the following table for details.

Invoice generation according to the same bill-to contacts and payment terms

If two subscriptions and two order line items have the same bill-to contact, and the two subscriptions and the account of the two order line items have the same payment term, invoice generation behaviors vary with the setting of the Allow to consolidate subscriptions, order line items and standalone invoice items into a single invoice billing rule.

If this billing rule is No, see the following table for details.

If this billing rule is Yes, see the following table for details.

Single invoice is generated according to default and specific bill-to contact and payment term

If one subscription does not have any defined bill-to contact and payment term, while the other has the same bill-to contact and payment term as the account, you can generate one single invoice for the two subscriptions. See the following table for details.