The Cyclical Billing Process & Window Billing

The cyclical bill creation process creates most bills. This process works as follows:

• An account can reference a bill cycle. The bill cycle's schedule controls when a cyclical billing process attempts to create bills for the account.

• Every bill cycle has a bill cycle schedule that defines the dates when a cycle's accounts are to be billed. Rather than attempt to create bills on one evening, your implementation may use a concept of "window billing" where the system attempts to produce bills for accounts over a few nights. This concept is useful if your billing is based on information being sent from an external source. It allows you to start billing accounts on the earliest possible day and then bill the stragglers over successive evenings. This results in much better cash flow.

• When the bill cycle creation process runs, it looks for bill cycles with open bill windows. It then attempts to create bills for the accounts in each such cycle. If a bill is successfully created, it is completed immediately and ready to send to the taxpayer. If a bill cannot be created, the system will create a bill in the "error" state and initiate a To Do entry with a message that can be analyzed by your billing staff. When the bill cycle creation process next runs, it deletes all "error" bills and attempts to recreate them. It continues this throughout the bill window. If bills are in error at the end of the window, they will remain in this state until a user fixes them. If the bills are still in error when the cycle's next window opens, a billing error will be generated.