6.2.5 Monitor your Billing Runs

Summary

We have added some additional notifications and features to optimize your billing run. Here is what you will get using the button "Invoice selected Records" to start the batch process:

  1. The user who started the billing run (or a user specified in the Feature Setting) will be notified by mail (and Chatter­Post if the user linked to the billing run), once certain phases have been completed. 

  2. After the run, you can manually recreate or resend failed PDFs with just one Button click.

Detailed Information

The billing run consists of four phases which are also reflected in the Billing Run Status field: 

  1. Update Pre-invoices

  2. Assign a number to invoices 

  3. Create PDF documents (unless disabled via the Administration Settings)

  4. Send PDF per email to the recipient(s) (optional and possibly disabled via Administration Settings

Each phase will create an email notification.

These emails will be sent when 'Additional E-Mail Notification' is set to true when triggering the Billing Run. These are standard emails with no Email templates to customize.

As of version 2.134, Phases 2 & 3 (PDF generation and sending PDF per email) can be disabled in the Administration Settings. Even where the dispatch type is set to Email, phase 3 cannot occur when PDF generation is disabled.

Chatter Feed

Here is an example of how your Chatter Feed for phases 1 and 2 might look like:

Email Notification for Phase 1

Update PreInvoice

“You have started a BillingRun (phase 1: UPDATE_PREINVOICE) batch process recently, which is now completed. Following are the process results.
Statistics

BillingRun: BR­000927
Number of processed invoices: 4
Number of successfully processed invoices: 4

All invoices are processed without error.
For successfully processed invoices, a new BillingRun batch job is started to create PDF. Once the process is

completed, a notification mail will be sent to you, and a chatter post will be created under the given BillingRun too.”

examples 2

“You have started a BillingRun (phase 1: UPDATE_PREINVOICE) batch process recently, which is now completed. Following are the process results.
Statistics

BillingRun: BR­000927
Number of processed invoices: 1
Number of successfully processed invoices: 0

Invoice PreInvoice-000012: Status of this invoice is Reviewed, expected is Created.

This means this pre-invoice will not be updated, but still will be invoiced

Email Notification for Phase 2

Create invoice numbers:

“You have started a BillingRun (phase 1: ASSIGN_INVOICE_NUMBER) batch process recently, which is now completed. Following are the process results.
Statistics

BillingRun: BR­000927
Number of processed invoices: 4
Number of successfully processed invoices: 4

All invoices are processed without error.
For successfully processed invoices, a new BillingRun batch job is started to create PDF. Once the process is

completed, a notification mail will be sent to you, and a chatter post will be created under the given BillingRun too.”

Create invoice numbers II:

“You have started a BillingRun (phase 1: ASSIGN_INVOICE_NUMBER) batch process recently, which is now completed. Following are the process results.
Statistics

BillingRun: BR­000927
Number of processed invoices: 14
Number of successfully processed invoices: 10

All invoices are processed without error.
What does it mean?

Create invoice numbers:

“You have started a BillingRun (phase 1: ASSIGN_INVOICE_NUMBER) batch process recently, which is now completed. Following are the process results.
Statistics

BillingRun: BR­000927
Number of processed invoices: 4
Number of successfully processed invoices: 4

All invoices are processed without error.
For successfully processed invoices, a new BillingRun batch job is started to create PDF. Once the process is

completed, a notification mail will be sent to you, and a chatter post will be created under the given BillingRun too.”

Email Notification for Phase 3

Create PDF documents:

“You have started a BillingRun (phase 2: CREATE_INVOICE_PDF) batch process recently, which is now completed. Following are the process results.
Statistics

BillingRun: BR­000927
Number of processed invoices: 4
Number of successfully processed invoices: 4
Number of successfully processed invoices with Email as Dispatch­Type: 2

All invoices are processed without error.

For successfully processed invoices with Email as Dispatch­Type, a new BillingRun batch job is started to send PDFs. Once the process is completed, a notification mail will be sent to you, and a chatter post will be created

under given BillingRun too.” 

Email Notification for Phase 4

Mail out PDF documents:

“You have started a BillingRun (phase 3: SEND_INVOICE_PDF) batch process recently, which is now completed. Following are the process results.
Statistics

BillingRun: BR­000927
Number of processed emails: 2
Number of successfully processed emails: 0

Error

Email E­Mail­895: No status returned Email E­Mail­894: No status returned

For failed emails, please go to the BillingRun, and use the button "Email Status" there to check the error, to resend the email.” 

Monitoring Buttons for each Billing Run

If your billing run shows the Status Error you can analyse the billing run results and additionally check the following: Each billing run record has three buttons ­ "Merge PDFs", “PDF Status”, and “Email Status” to check the status and manually do corrections if needed.

If you don't see those buttons, ask your Administrator to add them to the layout. 

  1. The Merge Button will create one document out of many which you can mail out. 

  2. The PDF Status Button checks the created invoice records and if they have a pdf attached 

     

  3. The Email Status Button verifies whether the email was sent, both show you a list and a green or red icon:


    You can resend any failed emails by pushing the Send Failed E-Mails button after the Billing Run is complete. If the Billing Run is still in progress you will see the following warning message asking you to wait until the Billing Run is finished before attempting to send failed emails.

If one or many items have failed you can manually re-send or create the PDF­. To automate the Emails being sent 7.6.4 Setup automated Invoices Emails.

For a better overview of a billing run, we strongly advise using the Billing run component.