What Is a Consolidated Invoice?

A consolidated invoice combines the shipments or orders of one customer into one bill. In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, an ERP, you can manually or automatically combine shipments from sales orders in a single sales invoice. Before you can, you must post, but not invoice, more than one shipment for the same customer in the same currency.

Microsoft's documentation describes two ways to do it:

• Manually: create a sales invoice for the customer, choose the Get Shipment Lines action, select the shipment lines to include, and post the invoice.
• Automatically: run the Combine Shipments batch job, which selects only sales orders where Combine Shipments is chosen, and choose Post Invoices to post the results in the same run.

When you combine and post shipments on an invoice, Business Central creates a posted sales invoice for the invoiced lines, and the Quantity Invoiced field on the original order updates. The original orders still exist, even if they are fully shipped and invoiced, until you delete them.

Some ERPs set consolidation as a customer default. In Infor CloudSuite Industrial, if you set up consolidated invoicing for a customer, all orders and lines subsequently entered for that customer are marked to be invoiced with consolidated invoicing, and the default can be overridden on an individual order or line. The setup includes:

• Consolidated Invoice: the check box that turns it on for the customer.
• Summarize: combines similar line items into a single line on the invoice.
• Invoice Freq: the invoicing frequency for the customer.

• Standard invoice: one invoice per order or shipment, each with its own amount due.
• Consolidated invoice: one invoice for several shipments or orders of the same customer, so the buyer reviews and pays one document.

In Business Central, the lines must belong to the same customer and currency. Lines from orders with a different sell-to customer can still be added to one invoice once you personalize the page to remove the sell-to filter, as long as the Bill-to Customer No. on the shipment lines matches the invoice. That lets orders from several sell-to customers be billed once to the account that pays.

A contractor account places four orders in a month, and the distributor ships each one:

• Order 1: $1,250
• Order 2: $2,400
• Order 3: $800
• Order 4: $3,550

Instead of four invoices, the distributor posts one consolidated invoice at month end for $1,250 + $2,400 + $800 + $3,550 = $8,000, due on the account's net 30 terms. The contractor approves and pays one document, and the four orders show as invoiced.

In Shopify B2B, on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Shopify Plus plans, payment terms are set for each company location and run per order: all terms start from the day the order is placed. During the term, B2B customers can log in to customer accounts, select an order, and pay for it by clicking Pay now.

Where you bill a buyer on one consolidated invoice instead, the system that combines the orders, such as an ERP, issues that invoice.

Uncap Connect is a Shopify-to-ERP integration app with native support for B2B companies, locations, catalogs, price lists, and payment terms: the order lands in the ERP, fulfillment updates land on the storefront, and nobody retypes a thing. On the buyer side, Uncap Portal puts NET terms, invoices, and payments in the portal.

• Accounts receivable
• Sales order
• EDI 810
• Credit memo
• Remittance advice
• Three-way match

• Microsoft Learn: Combine shipments on a single invoice in Business Central
• Infor CloudSuite Industrial: Setting Up Consolidated Invoicing for a Customer
• Shopify Help Center: Setting up payment terms in B2B