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What is a Billing Group

A Billing Group is a set of Billing Accounts that are billed together. It is the object the billing orchestrator opens a Bill Term against. Where a Billing Account decides what becomes one bill, a Billing Group decides what runs in one go.

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How you group them is your decision

There is no rule the system imposes about which accounts belong together. The group exists so an operator can decide what runs as one batch of work. A submetered billing provider might put one property owner’s thousand tenants into a single group, so that owner’s whole portfolio bills in one run and can be reviewed as a unit. Or they might put two different property owners into the same group because it suits them to process both together. Neither is more correct. The grouping is operational. It reflects how the people doing the billing want to work, not anything about the customers themselves.

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The one rule

Every Billing Account in a Billing Group must share the same Billing Period.A group cannot mix accounts billing monthly with accounts billing weekly, or accounts billing on the 1st with accounts billing on the 15th. The period is decided at the Plan and inherited down through the Subscription and the Billing Account, so by the time an account joins a group its period is already fixed.
This constraint is what makes the orchestrator simple. Because every account in a group falls due on the same day, the orchestrator never has to work out which accounts belong together — the group already answers that. It only has to work out when.

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What happens at run time

When a Billing Group’s Billing Period falls due:
  1. The orchestrator opens a Bill Term against the group.
  2. Every Billing Account in the group is brought into the term.
  3. All of those accounts’ Subscriptions are rated in the term’s subscription section.
  4. Their component values are summed into the term’s summary section.
See What a Bill Term Contains for what happens inside the term, and Term Creation for how the orchestrator picks groups up.