Why Your Certinia Billing Schedule Skips Months (And How to Fix It)

A real Billing Central issue, broken down — from the missing invoices to the two-minute fix.

If you manage billing in Certinia (formerly FinancialForce), you may have run into this frustrating scenario: you create a Billing Schedule from a Billing Contract Line Item, expecting a clean month-by-month schedule — and then discover that entire months are just... missing.

No error message. No warning. The schedule just quietly skips them.

Here's why that happens, and the simple fix that prevents it.

The Problem

A client was generating Billing Schedules directly from a Billing Contract Line Item. When they reviewed the output, October, November, and December were nowhere to be found. The contract itself looked correct — active, in range, no obvious issues. Yet three full months of billing simply never got scheduled.

This is a common trap in Certinia's Billing Central, and it's easy to miss because nothing in the UI flags it as an error.

The Root Cause: Date Misalignment

The issue traces back to a gap between three dates that Billing Central relies on together: the Contract's Start Date, the Contract's End Date, and the Billing Date used to generate the schedule.

When the Billing Date sits too far from the Contract's Start Date — even by a single month — Billing Central doesn't automatically "catch up" and generate schedules for the months in between. Instead, it treats the Billing Date as the effective starting point and skips everything before it.

In the original support case, the same pattern caused October, November, and December to be skipped — the Billing Date simply wasn't aligned with the full contract period.

The Fix

The rule of thumb is simple: your Billing Date must fall within the Contract's Start and End Date range — and it should match the period you actually intend to bill for.

1. Open the Billing Contract Line Item and check the Contract's Start Date and End Date.
2. Compare that range against the Billing Date you're using to generate the schedule.
3. If there's even a one-month gap between the Contract Start Date and the Billing Date, adjust the Date Range on the Billing Schedule so it aligns with the Billing Date before generating.
4. Correct the dates, then re-run the schedule creation.
5. Verify every expected month now appears in the generated schedule.

Prevention Checklist

Before generating any Billing Schedule in Certinia, it's worth a quick sanity check:

• Contract Start Date and End Date are both correct
• Billing Date falls inside that range
• No unintended gap between Contract Start Date and Billing Date
• Date Range on the schedule reflects the actual billing period intended

Building this check into your process — or your onboarding checklist for new Billing Central users — saves a lot of confused "where did my invoice go" conversations down the line.

The Takeaway

Missing months in a Certinia Billing Schedule almost always come down to one thing: date misalignment between the Contract and the Billing Date. It's not a bug — it's Billing Central doing exactly what it's told, based on the dates you give it. Get the dates right, and the schedule follows.

Part of an ongoing series on real-world Certinia Account Management issues and fixes.