Users of the Affinity integration will make use of Billing Platforms. These are explained below.

The Affinity integration uses Billing Platforms to control the billing and invoicing process.

Billing Platforms are assigned to items in inventory in the form of a Billing Route, and can be used to represent an external billing system.

These can be used to prevent invoicing of some items from occurring in The Layer. Billing Route also appears in a number of work stacks, grids and reports.

For users of the Affinity integration, the Affinity billing platform is defined in Settings - Billing Platforms.

The billing route for a product or service's up-front and recurring charges can be set independently in the item's record in inventory.

Only items with an up-front billing route of The Layer, or with no up-front billing route set, will be invoiceable in The Layer.

The Bill Status field against a Sales Order line is used to reflect an item's current position in the billing process. The following states are present in The Layer:

Items with a billing route set to Affinity will transition from one state to another based on various events. Firstly, all items must be converted to asset.

The second trigger depends on the item type:

Billing Status can be seen on the sales order grid as a coloured circle.

This is based on both recurring and up-front statuses.

You can check the statuses in more detail in Data Capture:

These values will be read-only unless you have the Allow update billing user role.

The Bill Start Date indicates the day on which billing will begin. This is populated as below:

These Bill Start Override field can be used to override the default date, so long as you have the Allow update billing user role. Otherwise, it will be a read-only field.

The Billing Export tool is an App within The Layer. It is accessible from the Apps button on the menu at the bottom of the screen, for users with the Apps - Change Queue role.

This app allows us to view items that have either an up-front or recurring billing status of Ready to Bill.

Use the top-right filter to show only items that have one or both billing route fields set to Affinity.

The following functions are available:

The two export file buttons are used to create CSV files that can be uploaded to Affinity.

The CLI export can be used to create a file containing information on CLIs in The Layer that have an Affinity billing route assigned. This will need to to be uploaded to Affinity before the product export file.

The product export file contains details of products and services that will be uploaded to Affinity for billing. These will be uploaded against the CLI where applicable.

Note: A check should also be made against the export table that each product to be exported has an SKU populated otherwise the upload into Affinity will fail because the product can’t be matched. In this case ensure the product is set up in Affinity and copy the Affinity Product Code into The Layer product ‘External SKU’ field before export.

The Billing Transfer button is used to change the status of selected lines from Ready to Bill to In Billing. This should be performed when the file upload to Affinity is complete