Use balance forward billing to print a single bill that includes all of a customer's transactions for the billing period and any balance carried forward from the previous billing period. This lets you send one consolidated bill to a customer, instead of a separate invoice for each transaction.
A balance forward bill includes the following items:
A beginning balance or the balance carried over from the last billing period.
An itemized list of current charges and activities (such as invoices, credit memos, debit memos, adjustments) in either summary or detail format.
Attention: You cannot update transactions that are included on a balance forward bill, regardless of how you set the system option Allow Change to Printed Transactions or the AR: Update Due Date profile option. Receivables considers inclusion on a balance forward bill to be an activity and you cannot update a transaction once it has activity against it.
Payment received for the last billing period.
Current total outstanding balance.
You can generate balance forward bills on a weekly, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, yearly, or even daily basis. To indicate billing frequency, define billing cycles. Or, use external billing cycles that you maintain outside Receivables. See: Balance Forward Billing Cycles.
You can generate bills consolidated at either the customer account or site level:
Account-level balance forward billing lets you generate one bill for each operating unit of the account, addressed to the primary bill-to site of the account.
Site-level balance forward billing lets you generate a balance forward bill for each bill-to site of a customer with multiple bill-to sites.
You can exclude one or more sites, and even one or more transactions, from a balance forward bill.
See: Setting Up Balance Forward Billing.
Statements and balance forward bills are similar, but they have different purposes. The table below lists the differences between a statement and a balance forward bill.
| Statements | Balance Forward Bill |
|---|---|
| Generated at customer account level. | Generated at account or site level. |
| Customer uses for informational purposes. | Customer pays from the bill. |
| Customers selected by statement cycle. | Customers selected by billing cycle and currency. |
Attention: Alternatively, consolidate imported invoices using the Imported Billing Number feature, instead of balance forward billing. See: Imported Billing Number.
When you print a draft or final balance forward bill, Receivables generates a unique balance forward bill number, which is assigned to each transaction on the bill.
Note: The balance forward bill number is automatically generated by a database sequence; you cannot create one manually.
Use the bill number to:
Query transactions that were included in a balance forward bill.
Accept a final balance forward bill.
Optionally reprint a draft or final balance forward bill.
Apply payment against a balance forward bill.
Attention: The balance forward bill number field always appears to the left of the transaction number field.
The balance forward bill number is displayed in these Receivables reports and windows:
Windows
Credit Transactions
Receipts
Transactions
Transaction Overview
Reports
Account Status
Aging Reports
Billing and Receipt History
Disputed Invoice
Past Due Invoice
Sales Journal by GL Account
Transaction Detail
Receivables uses Bill Presentment Architecture (BPA) to present the balance forward bill in an online view.
Use the BPA icon on the Transactions window to preview balance forward bills. These balance forward bills are the same as those seen by your customers using Oracle iReceivables.
BPA presents the balance forward bill in either summary or detail format, based on how Receivables originally generated the bill. You can drill down to individual invoices from the Balance Forward Bill window. See: Viewing Online Bills.
You can optionally modify the bill template or information as required and reprint the bill. See: Template Management.