In this blog, we’re going to look at a simple feature, but one I’ve personally really liked because it brings a lot to day to day work: the new billing history logging framework for sales orders and free text invoicing.
This improvement gives us much clearer visibility into what was invoiced, what failed, and why, and it lets us review errors without relying on special permissions or the batch job history. A small feature, but a very useful one, that genuinely helps when it comes to understanding what’s happening in each task and massively optimizes our invoicing process (and our IT friends too, who no longer have to keep digging into batch errors all the time 😉).
This feature is especially useful for us when we don’t have the required permissions to access the batch job history and review the errors generated during the invoicing job execution.
Up until now, even though we could see invoices that were posted, open, or in error, we didn’t have the ability to dig into the details of those invoices to do a more complete analysis.
With this new feature, the workspace itself includes these sections (as of version 47, it’s still in preview) and allows us to navigate directly to the error details. This gives us much clearer visibility into the invoicing process and helps us understand what’s happening in each run.
With this change, every time we invoice, or try to invoice, whether manually or through a batch, we’ll have the associated history available. That’s why it’s important to define how many days we want to keep this information, avoiding unnecessary data accumulation and protecting system performance.
Let’s go through each point in detail…
🌱 SETUP
First, let’s enable the feature «(Preview) Customer invoice logging framework for sales order and FTI history tracking.»
From the parameters, we can define how many days we want to keep the log data, for both invoices and customers. The default value is 30 days, but we can extend it up to a maximum of 45 days, depending on what we need to review and how we work.
Accounts Receivable Module >> Setup >> Accounts receivable parameters
This setting is super important, because it defines how many days we want to keep the information in the tables (and helps us protect system performance):
🌿 CustomerInvoiceDocumentLifecycleStageTransition
🌿 CustomerInvoiceDocumentLifecycleStageTransitionLog
Since version 45, maintenance jobs run daily.
We can review the execution details for these maintenance jobs directly from the data management maintenance workspace. And we also have the option to run them manually whenever we need to, either for this specific process or for any other maintenance process that’s required:
System administration >> Periodic tasks >> Data maintenance
We can find these maintenance jobs under the name:
🌿 Clean up Customer Data from Logging Table
🌿 Clean up free text invoice temp data used in free text invoice report
🌿 Clean up sales invoice temp data used in sales invoice report
🌱 CUSTOMER INVOICING WORKSPACE
We’ll notice in the workspace that the sections related to billing history have changed (for both sales orders and free text invoices):
In this first form, we see the information grouped by day (based on the server date), and two columns are shown: the number of invoices that were posted successfully and the number of invoices that ended up with errors.
By default, it shows the last 14 days, but we can adjust the filter to analyze any other period we need.
From the link on the number of posted or approved invoices (depending on the scenario), we can drill into the details:
🌿 Sales order / Invoice
🌿 Customer account
🌿 Currency
🌿 Audit trail: execution date and time
🌿 Batch: if it was posted manually, we’ll see “No”; if it was posted through a batch job, we’ll see “Yes”
🌿 Summary (sales orders only): if an invoice summary setup was used to consolidate multiple sales orders into a single invoice, we’ll see “Yes”. I’ll show the related functionality and setup a bit further down.
🌿 Line count: tells us how many lines the sales order or free text invoice has.
And to see the errors we got when trying to post the transactions, we just need to select “Error details” above the grid.
We’ll be able to see the exact same error details we’d see from the transaction itself:
If we want to check the batch job, we can click the little arrow and select “My batch jobs”:
From the list of all batch jobs, we just need to find the one we’re looking for:
🌿 Sales order invoice
🌿 Post free text invoice
If we look up the error log from the history, we’ll identify the same error we see in the workspace:
🌱 SUMMARY OF THE INVOICE
The information shown in the Summary column tells us whether we’re going to generate a single invoice by grouping multiple sales transactions. This applies, for example, when we consolidate invoicing by invoice account, or when we combine multiple sales orders in cases where we have several packing slips pending to be invoiced.
We can set this up as the default from the Accounts receivable parameters, under Update summary. This way, we can define how we want transactions to be grouped when generating the invoice, and make sure the summary criteria is applied consistently across our sales orders:
I hope this helps and you put it to work soon. See you in the next one! 🫶