About clearing documents
Clearing documents play a crucial role in maintaining financial transparency and trust between Cleverbridge and our clients. At Cleverbridge, we strive to ensure that every payout is clear, traceable, and fully supported by accurate documentation.
Each clearing period generates a complete set of clearing documents:
- A Self-billing invoice AKA Credit note: an official document Cleverbridge issues to its clients for each clearing period. It summarizes the total net, VAT, and gross amounts credited to the client, reflecting all transactions that occurred during the payment period. The self-billing invoice serves as the accounting record for the payout and includes essential identifiers such as the invoice number, date, payment period, and client ID.
- A Clearing report: A detailed spreadsheet that supports the self-billing invoice. It lists all underlying transactions (such as purchases, refunds, and adjustments) contributing to the totals shown on the invoice. The clearing report ensures transparency and provides all necessary data for reconciliation, accounting, and auditing of the payout for that specific period.
Together, the clearing documents offer a transparent, auditable view of your business activity and form the foundation for accurate reconciliation and seamless financial management.
Clearing documents in CA and SCM
Cleverbridge offers two ways to access your clearing documents: legacy Commerce Assistant version and the enhanced, web-based version in Subscription Commerce Manager. You can choose which document type your account uses.
How they differ
- Self-billing invoice (SCM) or Credit Note (CA): While the structure differs slightly, the key change in SCM is that it provides one Self-billing invoice per payout currency instead of a single mixed-currency Credit note PDF.
- Clearing reports: While the reports in CA and SCM both provide all the information necessary for interpretation of the Self-billing invoice/Credit note, the SCM report is more streamlined and focused on essential accounting fields, removing outdated pivots, and excluding personally identifiable information (PII).
Why move to SCM
While clients can choose which version to use, newer SCM reports provide:
- Web experience: You can access and obtain the documents from the SCM tool online.
- Per-currency documents: You receive one Self-billing invoice and one Clearing report per payout currency. This aligns with accounting best practices and reduces confusion.
- Focused data set: Legacy CA reports, with around 145 fields, contained extensive, sometimes redundant data. In SCM, the clearing report is optimized to fewer than 30 essential accounting fields, making it concise, relevant, and easy to reconciliate.
- Privacy by default: Field that contain Personally Identifiable Information (such as Street, Postal Code, or Phone fields) are excluded by default from SCM clearing reports. This approach minimizes data exposure and ensures stronger compliance with global data protection standards, including GDPR.
In other words, unless your currents set-up is strongly relying on the legacy report conventions (for example, historic multi-currency invoice PDFs, or extensive legacy field set), it is high time to contact your Cleverbridge representative and discuss the possibility of move to the new Clearing.
If you want to change your account’s default, contact Client Payments.
Sample clearing documents
You can download this sample to look at the structure of different clearing documents.
For detailed explanation of the clearing report fields, see Clearing report structure and fields