Hi Anthony,

I ran through this scenario creating a parent company and four sites under the parent with each site having a contract.  The result is two contracts each having two lines where each line reflects the single contract.

Customer setup is to consolidated across contract billing and each contract was defined for consolidation.  The first two contracts were given the group Phil-Group-Test:

The last two contracts were give the group Phil-Test-Group-2 but I only search on the string Phil-Test.

Point is, the Contract Grouping is only a selection filter in the search and is of itself does not cause a grouping if there are multiple groups matching the search.  See below where I filtered by Phil where Phil-Group-Test and Phil-Test-Group-2 contracts would be retrieved.  All four were billed together in a single invoice.

I hope this answers your question.

Hi Phil,

Thanks for your support

I didn”t understood, on your test , “Phil” is also another contract grouping ? or a search.

If you make a search directly with on your 2 contracts grouping name  = (not like) and then shedule for them a batch (Phil-Group-Test and Phil-Test-Group-2).
At the end of batchs : Do we have 2 different invoices consolidated ?
We could have a difference between what we saw on the screen and what the batch do with the rules. 

Thanks and Regards

It was a search filter to find both contract groups ( group like ‘Phil%’ in SQL terms) showing that if two contract groups were retrieved in the same search the billing would consolidated both contract groups on a single invoice.

It is a demonstration that whatever is retrieved and selected on the screen will be consolidated to a single invoice for the customer and not split into two due to the grouping.

If I used = then I would only be able to pull up two contracts to consolidate .

So if you made a batch to search for like ‘Phil%’ then all the contracts are billed on the single invoice.  If you made a batch to search for ‘Phil-Test%’ or ‘Phil-Test-Group-2’, then only the two contacts are billed to the same invoice.  Same with searching for ‘Phil-Group%’ or ‘Phil-Group-Test’.

I hope this clarifies…

Phil,

it’s my bad, I think a made a mistake to take the use case with a loop and not a global view.

The use case : 1 customer with consolidated billing for contracts, 4 sites, 4 contracts : one for each site. No change possible on this context.

The customer want to run each week a scheduled batch for :
1/ a consolidated invoice for contracts for  site 1 and 2 (because we perform a type of buisness)
and
2/ another consolidated invoice for contracts for site 3,4 (because we perform another busines)

For this purpose : what could be the best way in Alliance ?
is it contract grouping or other solution ?

Regards

anthony
 

My thinking is use the contract group to link the two contracts you want billed together so they are pulled up by the single query. 

So setup is:

1 customer, consolidate across contracts enabled

4 sites 

4 contracts with consolidation enabled

Contract 1 & 2 - assigned to grouping 1

Contract 3 & 4 - assigned to grouping 2

Set up Consolidated Billing Batch with filter = grouping 1 schedule it.

Set up Consolidated Billing Batch with filter = grouping 2, schedule it

This should result in two batch jobs, one for each grouping explicitly. You can check the batch job parameters to confirm the grouping is Equals. It should not be Like.

When job 1 runs, a single invoice containing billing for sites 1 & 2 should be created.

When job 2 runs, a single invoice containing billing for sites 3 & 4 should be created.

This is basically the first reply I posted above with the exception of using = <grouping> instead of Like.

I think you should just try this to confirm the results are what you expected.

Kind regards,

Phil

p.s. the above is for contract billing not service order billing based on the contracts. That is a different situation. I have not considered how to manage billing the service orders based on grouping related contracts.