Customer Overview

The Customer in CloudBilling is the entity to which Invoices are associated and represents the real customers of your business or organisation. A Customer, therefore, has Purchases associated with it and also has several specific attributes that describe how the customer should be treated within the CloudBilling system and operations (for instance, billing frequency, time zone, etc.).

Below, we take a look at the information that is stored for each Customer.

Primary Customer Information
- identifying information for the CloudBilling customer
Billing Related Information
- settings and information that describe the specifics of how this customer should be billed
Emailing Information
- if you make use of the Email module, this section contains the details relevant to this, such as the email addresses of the customer
Meta Information
- all other data that does not fit explicitly into CloudBilling, but is important for your billing calculations or invoice outputs

Primary Information

Customer Code: A unique code identifying this customer throughout CloudBilling.
Customer Name: A name identifying the customer
Customer Cluster: All customers need to be assigned to a Customer Cluster - this association indicates the group or groups that are relevant for this Customer.

Bill From Date: The date from which point onward a customer is billed. If Align period with calendar is enabled the first invoice will start at the beginning of the calendar period the Bill From Date is covered by. Otherwise, it will start exactly on the Bill From Date. After the first invoice has been created for a customer this setting no longer has any effect.

Invoice Period Settings

The customer has 3 key settings to control how Invoices are generated during the Billing Calculation process. Using these, the user can configure the frequency of the Invoice, and whether or not to ensure the Invoices are aligned to the start of the periods. The specific fields are:

Invoice Frequency: How often a customer should receive an invoice, specified as “Every X Periods”. Where the period can be days, months, or years.
Align period with calendar: True/False value indicating whether the invoice period of the customer should be aligned to the calendar. For instance, if the customer is invoiced monthly, should the invoice period start at the first of the month? If set to false, the start of the invoice period is determined by the exact Bill From Date.
Suspend Billing: Whether or not billing is suspended for this customer. When billing is suspended, invoices will not be generated or calculated for the customer. When a customer is taken off of suspension, calculation will resume and invoices will be generated for the period since the last invoice.

Other Billing Settings

Language Code: Indicates which Invoice Label language to use when generating the Invoice line descriptions. A list of codes can be found in Locale ID (LCID) Table.
Timezone: A value identifying the timezone the customer resides in. Used to determine whether DST is applicable or not and what offsets to use in terms of time.

Addresses

A list of Addresses associated with the customer. Each address must be uniquely named and can be used during Invoice Transformations.

Emailing

A customer can have a list of email addresses associated. These can be used to send invoices to the customer and each of them has the following properties:

Key – A key to refer to the address
Email Address – The actual address
Display Name – The name to be displayed in email clients.

Metadata

The Customer Metadata can be used during Billing Calculations, Invoice Transformations, or even just for searching in the management portal. There are 3 types of metadata: Text, Numbers, and Dates. All metadata is in the form of a name-value pair.