Viewing and Editing Organization Configuration
At Settings>Organization in the Console, you can view and edit the details of your Organization's configuration:
Currency and currency conversion rates.
Timezone.
Epochs for billing.
Billing in arrears or in advance for standing charges, minimum spend amounts, and Prepayments/Commitments fee billing.
Auto-approval time for bills.
A schedule interval in minutes or hours for updating Bills.
Number of days before bills are due.
External invoice date.
Bill numbering.
Bill statements.
Suppression of empty bills.
Consolidation of bills across billing frequencies.
Credit application order for billing as between Account Prepayment and Balance amounts.
This topic explains the various settings available for configuring your Organization and how to edit those settings to meet your requirements.
To view and edit your Organization:
1. Select Settings>Organization. The Organization page opens with the Configuration tab selected. You can view your Organization Details at the top of the page.
Select Copy against the Organization ID string to copy it to your clipboard.
2. To edit the configuration, on the Organization Configuration Details panel select Edit. The Organization Configuration page opens.
3. Work down the page to edit the setting for your m3ter Organization - required settings have a red asterisk against them:
Currency and Currency Conversions:
When an Organization is first created, a default US Dollar (USD) currency is added and pre-selected as the Organization billing currency. This ensures that from the outset Bills can be generated for your Organization.
You cannot delete this default USD currency.
If you want to define a different currency as your Organization level billing currency, first create the currency you need and then select it in the Currency drop-down list as the billing currency for your Organization.
If you now longer require the default USD currency, you can archive it. See Creating and Managing Currencies for more details on working with currencies.
The currency you select for your Organization determines the billing currency and overrides any currency settings in your pricing Plans:
For example, if the Organization currency is set to USD and a pricing Plan used for an Account is set to GBP, the bill for an Account using that Plan is calculated in GBP, and then each bill line item converted to USD amounts.
If you expect to have pricing Plans on Accounts in currencies that differ from your Organization currency, you can add conversion rates under Currency Conversions when you edit your Organization configuration.
Warning: Ensure Currency Conversion Rates are Set Up! If you don't define a conversion rate to convert a pricing currency you've used to the billing currency used for an Account, Bills will fail to generate for that Account - see below Adding Currency Conversion Rates.
Billing in arrears/advance. You can select to bill in arrears or advance for:
Standing charge billing. Default is to bill in arrears.
Minimum spend billing. Default is to bill in arrears.
Prepayments/Commitment fee billing. Default is to bill in advance.
Tip: Override Organization settings? You can override the organization-wide settings for Standing charge billing and Minimum spend billing when you create Plan Templates and Plan Groups.
Auto-approve bills. You can enable for bills to be automatically approved after a defined grace period. Once enabled, you can define the Bill auto-approval grace period (in minutes, hours, or days) following bill creation, after which the bills will be automatically approved.
For example, suppose you are using a monthly billing frequency for an end customer Account and Bills are created at 12 midnight on the the last day of each month. You then enable Auto-approve bills and set the Bill auto-approval grace period to 2 hours. Each month's Bill is approved automatically at 2 a.m. on the first day of the month following.
Warnings!
Possible Conflict between Auto-Approval of Bills and Scheduled Bill Interval! If a Bill is recalculated because of late-arriving data after being auto-approved, and the bill auto-approval interval is less than 24 hours, then the Bill will revert to a pending, unapproved state:
We recommend setting the auto-approval interval to 24 hours or longer when using scheduled bill updates.
Please see Understanding the Scheduled Billing Process for more details.
Auto-Approval tied to Bill date! If you generate a Bill early and before the scheduled Bill date, it will not be auto-approved from the date/time you do this, but only at the specified time after the Bill date.
Scheduled bill interval (hours). Define an interval in minutes or hours for when you want Bills to be updated. For more details, see Scheduling Billing.
Timezone. Use the drop-down list to select the timezone for your Organization. For more details and guidance on timezone settings, please see the Timezone Settings - Notes and Recommendations topic for further details.
Epochs. Define the Epoch dates for your Organization. Epoch dates for billing periods: Year, Month, Week, and Day, define the date when the first Bill is created for Accounts and then act as a reference for when in the applied billing frequency period subsequent bills for Accounts are created:
For example, suppose you attach a Plan to an Account where the Plan is configured for monthly billing frequency and you've defined the period the Plan will apply to the Account to be from January 1st, 2022 until January 1st, 2023. You then set a Month Epoch date of February 15th, 2022. The first Bill will be created for the Account on February 15th, and subsequent Bills created on the 15th of the months following for the remainder of the billing period - March 15th, April 15th, and so on.
The defaults are:
Year Epoch. January 1st, 2022.
Month Epoch. January 1st, 2022.
Week Epoch. January 4th, 2022.
Day Epoch. January 1st, 2022.
Note that you can override the Epoch dates for billing configured for your Organization at individual Account level using the Billing cycle date setting for an Account - see Creating, Editing, and Deleting Accounts.
Days before bill due. Enter the number of days after the Bill generation date that you want to show on Bills as the due date:
You can also define this at the individual Account level - see Creating an Account. This is useful for cases where you want Bills for your end-customer Accounts to show different due dates. The setting at individual Account level takes precedence over any setting at Organizational level.
External invoice date. For your accounting purposes, select which date you want to use for external invoicing with respect to billing periods - two options:
First day of next period. Select this if you want to recognize usage revenue in the following period. This is the default.
Last day of arrears. Select this if you want to recognize usage revenue in the same period that it's consumed, instead of in the following period.
Bill statements. Use this panel to set Organization defaults for Bill Statements:
Statement definition. Select the default Statement definition for your Organization.
Auto-generate statements. Select for auto-generation of Bill statements when Bills are either approved or locked:
None. Disable auto-generation.
JSON. Auto-generate Statements in JSON format only
JSON and CSV. Auto-generate Statements in both JSON and CSV format.
Bill numbering. You can use two settings to control how you want to number your Bills:
Select Enable bill numbering. The two settings are activated. (Default is disabled):
Bill prefix. Enter a string as prefix for Bill numbering.
Bill sequence start. Enter a start number from which Bills will be numbered in time sequence according to date/time the Bill was first created.
For example, if you enter INVOICE- for Bill prefix and 100 for Bill sequence start, the first Bill generated after you update your Organization configuration will have a REFERENCE number of INVOICE-101.
If you do not enable Bill numbering for your Organization, then a default numbering is used for the Bill REFERENCE number:
The default number is composed using INV- as a prefix concatenated with the last four characters of the Bill ID. For example, if the last four characters of a Bill's ID are 7c19, then the Bill REFERENCE number will be INV-7c19.
Important! We strongly recommend that you enable Bill numbering for your Organization to ensure reliable numbering of Bills sent through to your Accounts Receivable system.
Suppress empty bills. Enable this switch if you want to prevent generation of Bills that contain no line items. Default is disabled.
Consolidate bills. Enable this switch if you want to consolidate different billing frequencies into a single bill. Default is disabled.
If disabled, Bills are created by bill date and billing frequency.
If enabled, charges that are billed on a given bill date are automatically added to the bill regardless of charge billing frequency.
For example, if you enable this option and charges are due on an Account for an invoice date of February 1st:
For standing charges and usage charges under a monthly-billed Plan.
For Prepayments fees billed annually.
Then, the billing frequencies for the different charges are ignored and a single Bill is created for the Account for the invoice date and covering all of these charges. In contrast, if Consolidate bills is disabled, then in this example two separate bills would have been created.
Warnings! Consolidating bills:
If you've already run billing with Consolidate bills disabled for your Organization but you then enable it, subsequent Bills for specific bill dates will now start afresh and not update earlier non-consolidated Bills for the same bill date. In almost all cases, this will result in duplicate bills for the same Account.
Similarly, if you've already run billing with Consolidate bills enabled, you'll be left with the old consolidated Bill for an Account - which is no longer updated - and start generating new Bills for the same Account at, for example, monthly frequencies.
We therefore recommend caution if you need to switch to or from Consolidate bills, and, to avoid any of these unwanted billing conflicts, suggest you archive any earlier versions of Bills or delete them entirely.
If you enable the Consolidate bills option, when you run Bills manually using the Run Billing modal, the Bill frequency option to run billing only for Bills of a certain frequency will not be available. See Running Bills Manually.
Credit application order. Select to define the order in which any Prepayment or Balance amounts on end customer Accounts are to be drawn-down against for billing. Four options:
Prepayment then balance. Draw-down against Prepayment credit before Balance credit. Default.
Balance then prepayment. Draw-down against Balance credit before Prepayment credit.
Prepayment only. Only draw-down against Prepayment credit.
Balance only. Only draw-down against Balance credit.
Tip: You can override the setting for Credit application order you select for your Organization at the individual Account level. See Creating an Account.
Currency Conversions. If you intend to use mixed currencies for billing against Accounts, you must add relevant currency conversion rates to convert any specific Account Plan currencies to the selected billing currency. For more details, see Adding Currency Conversion Rates.
4. When you have completed your editing changes, select Update Organization Configuration. Your changes are saved and you are returned to the Organization page.
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