Billing group

When one company has five billing accounts, a billing group is how they roll up. A pharmaceutical client might have a New York office, a Philadelphia office and a field sales team, each with its own cost centre and its own approver, but one accounts-payable department that wants a single monthly invoice. The group is the layer above the accounts.

Grouping matters for cash and for sales. A single consolidated invoice gets paid faster than five small ones chasing five inboxes, and the group total is what the account manager looks at when deciding how much attention a client deserves. Negotiated pricing is usually agreed at the group level and applied to every account in it.

The common mistake is building the hierarchy backwards, with one giant account and cost centres as free-text notes. Then nobody can produce a per-office statement, the client's AP team rejects the invoice, and the terms slip from Net 30 to Net 60 by default.

How liverybook handles it

Billing groups sit above billing accounts: a group collects the accounts of one payer, such as the regional offices of one company, while each account keeps its own rate list, payment methods, trips and invoice lines. Transactions remain the single ledger and balance due is recomputed from them. See billing.

Related terms

• Billing account
• Net terms
• Account health
• Rate list