Why is there a Location Type AND a Checkbox for billing addresses?

Question

In CiviCRM you have a location type named billing. In addition to that, there is a checkbox named "Billing location for this contact".

As far as i know, CiviCRM will use the address that has the checkbox ticked whenever you do things that require a billing address such as creating an invoice - the location type is not relevant (correct me if I am wrong).

Having two options to mark an address as the billing address is extremely confusing for users. The location type cannot be disabled either and renaming the label is obviously not a good idea either.

Can anyone tell me why billing addresses are handled this way? Is there actually a chance to change that in a future release and if yes what would be the requirements to do so?

Answer 1

The location type is mainly as a "safe" way for recording a billing address that may differ from a contact's home, work, or other addresses. If you make a transaction that records a contact's billing address, you can't reasonably assume that the address is the contact's primary address. (Maybe it's your home address, or maybe it's the billing department of your employer.) In fact, there may be a primary address separately recorded on the contribution or event form.

Either way, you need to create an address, not overwrite an existing address, and not imply that it's a home, work, or other type of address. Consequently, contribution forms will use the "billing" location type and mark that as used for billing.

(The checkbox is relatively new, too, so there didn't use to be this ambiguity. However, the checkbox allows you to identify an actual location as the billing address so you don't have duplicate information.)

In practice, it's important to let your users know to use the checkbox, not the location type, for determining whether an address is for billing.

For future versions, I'd suggest that the billing location type wouldn't be necessary if contacts were allowed to have multiple instances of the same location type. For backwards compatibility, old sites could keep the billing location type, but new sites could just have a new home (or whatever default) address get added and marked as billing.

Answer 2

We've picked this up at the code sprint in Edale, if you're interested please follow up here: https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-17783?focusedCommentId=95284