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About Billing in Siebel Energy

The procedures described in this chapter are usually performed by customer service representatives (CSRs). Using Siebel Energy, CSRs can retrieve past invoices, current unbilled charges, and other invoice details. CSRs can also arrange payment plans, record payments against an outstanding balance, or request adjustments to the customer's records in the event of an incorrect bill.

Administrators involved with billing benefit from reading this chapter. It describes how your CSRs access billing information and update billing accounts. After becoming familiar with the end-user procedures, you can customize the software to fit your company's needs.

Billing processes are integrated with an external billing application that Siebel Energy accesses to retrieve information, such as the customer's last statement. That information is stored temporarily in Siebel database tables.

Performance of the billing screens depends on both the configuration and speed of retrieval from the external billing application. Configurators can set up Siebel Energy so that all messages are sent and received from the back-office application in real-time or batch mode. The results of these messages can also be stored in Siebel Energy database tables, allowing CSRs to resolve them in real-time.

Your company is responsible for performing the integration of Siebel Energy with billing applications. For more information, see Overview: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration. For information about setting up profiles that are used to run credit ratings, record billing preferences, or store tax exemption information, see Profiles in Siebel Energy.