The term "pass through" billing is used to describe the practice of receiving charges calculated by third parties and presenting them on the taxpayer's bill along with your own charges. "Pass through" billing is implemented in the system using Billable Charges.
The following points provide information to help you decide the most appropriate way to implement "pass through" billing given your specific requirements:
Taxpayers with pass through charges will need a separate obligation to hold the pass through charges. We refer to this type of obligation as a "billable charge" obligation.
An Obligation's obligation type controls whether an obligation can have billable charges linked to it. Specifically, the obligation type must have a "special role" of Billable Charge.
A billable charge obligation holds the billable charges until the taxpayer is next billed. At that time, a separate bill segment will be created for each unbilled billable charge linked to the billable charge obligation.
While it is not required, we recommend creating a separate billable charge obligation for each type of pass through charge.
You can interface billable charges using the Billable Charge Interface. The interfaced charges can consist of any of the following:
Pre-calculated bill lines that will be presented "as is" to the taxpayer.
Rate quantities that are used by the system to calculate the charges on behalf of the third party.
The bill lines on a billable charge can fit into any of the following categories:
Memo-only (i.e., don't affect the general ledger). A bill line that is memo-only contains information that is purely informational.
Show on the taxpayer bill. It is possible to create bill lines that affect the general ledger, but are not shown on the taxpayer's bill. This is an unusual practice, but it happens.
Summary / detail. Each bill line has an indication of whether it is a summary or detail line. This only impacts bill presentation.
The above indicators can be defaulted onto a billable charge line by using Billable Charge Line Types when you interface the lines into the system.
Characteristics (i.e., user-defined fields) can be associated with billable charge lines. You might populate this information if you are interfaced information that may be useful during bill presentation or for reporting purposes.
If rate quantities are specified on a billable charge, they are saved on the bill segment created when the billable charge is billed.
Cancel / rebill for billable charges is quite different than for normal bill segments. A billable charge bill segment can be cancelled, and this will reverse the financial effects of the billable charge. But without new information from the source, there is no way to rebill the taxpayer. Therefore, if the original charges were incorrect, the source system would send both a reversal of the charges and a newly revised set of information. These could be passed as two separate billable charges or they could be combined on a single billable charge.
For most other functionality, the billable charge obligation supports the same functionality as normal obligations. This includes payment distribution, collections, current & payoff balances, etc.
For more information about billing billable charges, refer to How To Create An Ad-hoc Bill. For more information about creating a billable charge, refer to Maintaining Billable Charges. For more information about interfacing a billable charge from an external system, refer to Uploading Billable Charges.
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