Adding a business affiliate billing policy

A billing policy is a set of information that establishes a rule for adding billing lines to documents. Although you can add billing lines to any document manually, creating billing policies allows you to automatically compute the billing lines needed for a particular document.

Only business affiliates of Type Owner can have billing policies and be billed.

You can add as many billing policies as you like, as long as the combination of Charge Type, Billing Basis, Unit of Measure, Document Type, and Line Type is unique across all policies for this business affiliate. When you bill a document for which this business affiliate is the Owner, all of the billing policies that have Document Type of the document you are billing for are applied.

To add a business affiliate billing policy:

From the Add Business Affiliate page, select the Billing Policies tab.
Select Add from the toolbar to add a new billing policy.
The Add Charge Type screen appears. The charge type is the kind of service or fee that you bill this Owner for. Check the checkbox to the left of the Charge Type you want to add. Select OK. The Add screen closes and a new billing policy with that Charge Type is added.
Tip: You can select multiple Charge Types to add multiple billing policies at once.

If you need to add a new charge type first, see Adding charge types.
The General ledger code for this charge type is automatically filled in. You can key in a new value to override the general ledger code if necessary.
Select the Billing Basis. The Billing Basis answers the question: "When this billing policy (rule) is applied and adds billing lines to a document, how should the billing lines be added?" The options for Billing Basis are:
- per Document - When applying this billing policy to a document, create one billing line, with a quantity to charge of one. For example, you would use this Billing Basis if you charge a flat fee for each shipment.
- per Line - When applying this billing policy to a document, create one billing line and charge for each line item on the document (regardless of the quantity on that line). For example, if you are computing billing lines for a shipment with 10 shipment line items, then using a per Line billing policy creates one billing line, with a quantity to charge of 10.
- per Unit of Measure - When applying this billing policy to a document, create one billing line and charge for the quantity of goods using the billing unit of measure on the document. For example, you would use this Billing Basis if you bill based on the number of pallets on a document. If you are computing billing lines for a shipment with 10 line items, and three of those lines use pallets as a billing unit of measure for a total of 2.5 pallets, then this billing policy creates one billing line, with a quantity to charge of 2.5.
If the Billing Basis is per Unit of Measure, select the Unit of Measure to bill against from the drop-down. If the document has any line items with this unit of measure as their billing unit of measure, this policy is applied to create one billing line for that unit of measure.
This field is only applicable if the Billing Basis is set to per Unit of Measure.

Note: The drop-down only includes the system default units of measure. If you have created your own unit of measure that you are using as a billing unit, key in the name here. Make sure that the name you key in exactly matches the name of the unit of measure you created in the item master.
Enter the Rate to bill by keying in a value. This the Rate for each billing line generated by this policy. The Rate is multiplied by the quantity for the billing line to compute the total charged. For example:
- If the Billing Basis is per Document, the total charged is just the Rate.
- If the Billing Basis is per Line, the total charged is the Rate * the number of line items on the document.
- If the Billing Basis is per Unit of Measure, the total charged is the Rate * the quantity of the Unit of Measure of this billing policy that is a billing unit of measure for some items on the document. For instance, if you bill a shipment with 10 line items, all of which have a billing unit of measure of pallets and that together total 2.5 pallets, then this billing policy creates one billing line that charges Rate * 2.5.
Select the Document Type from the drop-down list. This is the type of document to which this billing policy applies.
If your Billing Basis is per Line or per Unit of Measure and the Document Type is Kit Order or Kit, select the Line Type from the drop-down list. The Line Type describes which set of lines on the kit order or kit you want to bill for: the products (Items to Produce table), by-products, or component items. (The Line Type must be empty for any other Document Type; kit orders and kits are the only documents with multiple tables of line items.)
When you are finished adding the billing policy, select OK.

Note that you cannot add business affiliate billing policies through an import spreadsheet.