Overview of 3PL Billing in Infoplus

This is a quick high-level overview of how to set up 3PL Billing in Infoplus.

The Infoplus 3PL Billing module allows you, as a 3PL using Infoplus, to fully define, customize, and automate your billing procedures based on activity from the Infoplus WMS system and parcel invoices imported from UPS and FedEx. 

After you setup a Customer Invoice Template, Infoplus automatically applies your Billing Rules, and summarizes your customers' activity to produce  Invoice Worksheets, which you can review and edit as needed, then send to your customers or feed into your Invoice System.  

The module consists of 3 main components, as summarized by the following diagram:

The 3 components are a set of 3PL Billing Activity tables, the 3PL Billing Setup app, and Invoice Worksheets.  

It is important to understand that the 3PL Billing module does not pull it's data directly from the WMS tables (order, item receipt etc.). Instead, it relies on data being populated into the Billing Activity tables prior to invoices worksheets being created. For example, data from the Order table will be populated into the Order Activity table once data is populated. Users will be able to specify the date ranges for which they would like to populate the data from. 

Quick Steps

1: Populate Billing Activity: This can be done manually via the Populate Billing Data feature, or this can be automated via Populate Billing Data Plans. 

2: Configure Billing Rules: essentially a comprehensive list of billable items regardless of what clients they are applied to and the rates they get billed at (that is covered in the next step). 

3: Configure Customer Invoice Templates: Each line of business can have one or more customer invoice templates. This is where users will specify which billing rules apply to the template as well as the rates at which it is billed. 

4: Create Invoice Worksheets: Create one or more invoice worksheets at a time from the action menu of Customer Invoice templates. The system will prompt users to specify a date range for the billing period. 

5: Review/Export Invoice Worksheets, Invoice Worksheet Lines & Invoice Worksheet Line Details:  After a customer invoice worksheet is created, users can review the entire invoice or they can look at the granular invoice line or invoice line detail tables (providing context and backup data of the billing).

3PL Billing Activity tables

Infoplus uses a set of simple, flat tables to collect detailed snapshots of all of the activity that has taken place inside the WMS module of Infoplus.  These tables then provide the source data that Infoplus uses to create Invoice Worksheets, which you then enter into your Invoicing system (outside of Infoplus).

Infoplus collects data into the 3PL Billing Activity tables as part of the process of running a Customer Invoice Template and producing Invoice Worksheets.  These tables are copies of the raw WMS activity, designed to be easier to use for invoicing.  You can edit the data in these tables, for example, if you have special circumstances, such as activity that should be exempt from an invoice, or manual adjustments that need to be made.    

3PL Billing Setup App

You use the 3PL Billing Setup app to define Customer Invoice Template (you may think of them as recipes or blueprints) for what your data should be on your customers' invoices.  The key part of a template is what the line items are, what the activity data behind those line items is, and how those line items should be calculated (i.e., charges and price breaks).  You use Billing Rules to define how data from the activity tables are used to compute the quantities that appear on each invoice.  

In the simplest case, you will do a one-time setup of a Customer Invoice Template in this app, and then, at the end of every billing period, that Template uses its Billing Rules to gather data from the activity tables to generate all of the lines into an Invoice Worksheet.  

You will have 1 or more Customer Invoice Template for each of your customers.  You will create these templates when you bring on a new customer, and you'll edit them when you change how you're invoicing a customer, but they will not necessarily change on a month-to-month basis, unless you make changes to how your customers are to be invoiced.  

Invoice Worksheets

The outputs of the 3PL Billing Module are Invoice Worksheets.  These Worksheets can be used to generate a PDF and/or .csv report that can be exported out of Infoplus and into your Invoicing System.  This information is also accessible via our API. 

Note that aside from the backup documents provided in Invoice Worksheet records, the Invoice Worksheet Line Detail table will provide context around each invoice worksheet line. 

How to View and Edit Incorrect Shipping Charges 

If there happens to be a scenario where there is a discrepancy in the amount you charged one of your clients and the amount you paid to ship their items, you can use the Upload Parcel Invoice Table and the Reconcile Parcel Invoice Table to view the discrepancies and correct the payment. 

Ready to get going? See our Configuring 3PL Billing article to learn more and get started.