Billing cycle changes during Business Agreement Change Process

[Former Member]

Hi Experts,

We are trying to generate a change process in order to change the billing cycle of one provider contract.

The problem is that we are not trying to change de product like the config guide describes (SAP CRM Telco Config Guide on page 149: Billing Cycle Changes during product change process).

We have a Z field in Business Agreement with Billing Cycle associated, and we need to change the Business Agreement from a Provider Contract, and reflect the Billing Cycle change too (in order to replicate to Provider Contract in CI).

Has anyone done this before?

Thanks in advance.

regards, Marcelo.

[Former Member]

Hi Marcelo, nobody has done that before and nobody will do it in the future.

Billing cycle is not characteristic defined on provider contract level.

From business logic perspective billing cycle defines start and end date of period for which billable items has been billed and invoiced. For that reason, in FICA billing cycle is strictly related for contract account (business agreement in CRM terminology) since contract account is object to which one invoice in one billing period is related.

Also, every contract account can have one or more provider contracts. If you change billing cycle because of need of one provider contract, you will change cycle for all provider contracts invoiced under their corresponding contract account.

You should be careful when changing billing cycle for some specific contract account since you could exclude some billable items from billing process with new end date of billing cycle.

Also, you must make sure billing process is scheduled (automatically or manually) for those new dates you will set with new cycle in your specific contract account.

Best regards,

Mario

[Former Member]

Hi Mario!

First of all thanks so much for your quick response.

I want to share with you the following link (from CRM perspective) that explains better what I mean when I explained about the billing cycle in provider contracts (maybe I incorrectly explained on the above message). Also in CRM side we do not find the field properly for Billing cycles.

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp03/helpdata/en/7a/247b38f3ba48db8e9547f4e3de60f0/frameset.htm

I think that in ERP side (what someone told me) there is two billing cycles, but in CRM there is only one (if I did not misunderstand the CRM config guide).

((extract from CRM Config Guide))

2.6.10.4 Bill Cycle in Contracts

During order capturing, a bill cycle is determined, stored with the contract and replicated to SAP CI. This happens at order item level. Only main items have their own bill cycle. Sub items inherit the bill cycle from their corresponding main item, but the bill cycle is not stored in sub-items.

If a contract change process is executed, the bill cycle is copied from the contract into the change order and is not determined again.

The previous introduction (long introduction ) was just to express that I understand your point of view (regarding changing billing cycles), but my client need to have a change process in order to do this.

So I was reading a little more the standard solution and the config guide (helped by our developer expert) and we realized that we have to implement a provider contract change process using a z class copied from CL_CRM_BTMF_TELCO_PRODUCT_CHAN to use the standard validation of billing cycle changes  (http://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp03/helpdata/en/46/85a8512a5dcc7de10000000a441470/frameset.htm)

We tested it and generate the new position in provider contract as we need.

I think this would be suitable solution.

What do you think?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards, Marcelo.