Standard 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.
Document types
Each clearing period generates:
- A self-billing invoice (called a credit note in CA): 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. It 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: the legacy Commerce Assistant (CA) and the enhanced, web-based Subscription Commerce Manager (SCM).
How they differ
In SCM, the document you receive is called a Self-billing invoice, and it is generated one-per-payout-currency, so if you're paid in USD and EUR, you'll see two separate invoices. In CA, the equivalent document is labeled a Credit Note, and it comes as a single mixed-currency PDF; CA's menus and tooltips also refer to it as a Credit Note.
Both systems give you everything you need to understand and reconcile those documents, but SCM's Clearing report is leaner and easier to work with. It focuses on the essential accounting fields, drops outdated pivots, and leaves out any Personally Identifying Information. It also mirrors SCM's approach to currencies, organizing the data by single payout currency, so it lines up cleanly with the invoices you receive.
Why move to SCM
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 reconcile.
- Privacy by default: Fields 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.
If your processes rely on legacy CA report conventions, such as mixed-currency credit notes or the broader legacy field set, contact Client Payments to determine whether your account can move to SCM clearing.
Sample clearing documents
You can download this sample to look at the structure of different clearing documents.
Next steps
For an optional, configured transaction-level export, see Clearing supplement file.