Statements and Invoices
Overview
This section documents the billing documents Aria Billing Cloud produces for an account: statements, invoices, and credit memos. An invoice represents all charges for a specific billing period. A statement collects invoice items and other transactions into a single customer-facing document. A credit memo reduces an amount owed or cancels future charges. Use this section when a query concerns generating, viewing, or adjusting an account's billing documents, rather than the underlying plan or payment configuration.
Statements and Invoices Summary
- Statements covers what a statement is and how Aria generates one. Statements generate automatically after nightly invoicing or on demand, and a user can preview the next statement before it generates. This subsection also covers enabling XML statements, assigning a statement template per account, and setting the statement sequence source (Account, Billing Group, or Functional Group) for unique, sequential numbering, including sequencing used for credit notes.
- Invoices covers the Invoices screen, where a user generates new invoices (immediate, pending, or retroactive) and reviews existing ones. It covers approving pending invoices, including handling collection failures and dunning; changing an invoice's posting status (Unposted or Posted) to a general ledger; setting a custom invoice status; the Invoice Details screen, where a user views, prints, applies payments or credits, voids, or rebills an invoice; open charges, which are pending prorated charges awaiting the next anniversary date; and installment terms invoicing use cases for non-subscription offerings.
- Credit Memos covers the four credit memo types: invoice-based (applied to specific invoice line items), general (an on-account goodwill credit), cancellation (credits unused paid time on a canceled service), and price change (credits a price difference). Applying a credit memo immediately affects the account balance and triggers a customer notification email built from a credit memo template. This subsection also covers credit memo numbering and distinguishes credit memos from credit notes, which exist specifically for EU VAT compliance on voided invoices. Relevant APIs include create_cm_m, apply_cm_m, unapply_cm_m, update_cm_m, get_cm_details_m, get_cm_list_m, and get_invoice_cm_details_m.
Statements and Invoices Topics
- Statements
- A statement is a collection of transactions for a given period that provides an overview of charges and payments on an account. Statements are automatically generated after invoices are processed each billing cycle and can also be generated on demand to view charges and account balance for a specific time period.
- Invoices
- An invoice is a record of all the charges for a given billing period in the system. Invoices can be created immediately, on an account's anniversary date, as well as in "pending" status, to be approved at a later time.
- Credit Memos
- Credit memos are issued to customers as a way to reduce the amount owed on an invoice or cancel future charges. There are three main types of credit memos: invoice-based credit memos, which are applied directly to line items on a specific invoice; general credit memos, which are applied to plan instances; and cancellation credit memos, which cancel future charges for a service.
MCP Guidance
Route billing-period charge and posting questions to Invoices. Route customer-facing document generation and numbering questions to Statements. Route refund, dispute, goodwill credit, or future-charge cancellation questions to Credit Memos, and confirm the request is not actually about EU credit notes before selecting a credit memo tool.