View and Manage Bill Details

As a customer service representative, you can quickly access and view the bills generated for customers to answer their questions on billing.

From the dashboard, you can view the Bill Summary Information for each of the multiple bills that the customer may receive. Using the Bill Summary on the dashboard, you can open the bill details view to see the most recent bill generated for the customer. You can also view the entire bill and select a previous bill period to view the bill generated for that period. The various amounts that you see are inclusive of taxes. Wherever applicable, click the tool tip to see the included tax amount.

Bill Unit and Billing Profile

A billing unit relates to a time series of bills for a set of communication services (Assets). For every bill period, also known as bill cycle, a bill is generated for the set of services.

The services that a customer receives may be charged in different bill units. In this case, the customer receives more than one bills for the use of the services in a specific time period. A billing unit is mapped to a billing profile.

Note:

When the bill is subject to an unsettled dispute, then you can see the badge Disputed next to the Bill ID.

Bill Charges

Any bill is classified into two types:

• Service Charges: Service charges are related to the use of communications services. For example, wireless, broadband, and landline.

  For a particular service, service charges are broken down onto bill items. For example, monthly fixed charges, usage-based charges for minutes or data used, domestic or international use of the services, use of specific service features, and so on.

  Bill Item amounts are represented by events and related unit charges that are defined based on the definition of the terms of service. For example, an event could be a number of peak-time minutes of use, which are charges at a peak time price per minute

• Account Charges: Account charges aren't directly related to the use of a particular service. Few common examples of account charges include account setup, installation fees, and regulatory fees.

A customer service representative discusses with customers their billing charges up to the bill items. Event-level definitions of bill items are accessed and managed by customer service managers.

Bill Charge History

Here you can see the various bill items applied to the charge, since the bill was generated. These may include billing adjustments, settled disputes, and bill payments. To see the bill charge history, on the Bill Details page, from the relevant bill line click Actions > View Charge History.

Accounting Methods

Communications Service Providers will use either the balance forward or the open item accounting method. Let's understand what's the key difference between these two accounting methods on a bill.

Accounting Method	Description
Balance Forward Method	Any bill in a billing cycle includes the previous amount due. The bill total is the sum of those charges. When a bill is unpaid, the past amount due would increase and this results in the next bill total increase.
Open Item Method	Any bill in a billing cycle includes the account and service charges for that cycle. All the previous amount of dues are excluded from the bill total. The previous due amounts are still reflected on the balance for the billing unit but not carried over from one bill to the other.

View Original and Current Charges

On the Bill Details view you can see both the original and the current charges. As a customer service agent when you select a charge for adjustment, the charge that you see is the current charge that may differ from the amount in the previous view.

Go to the history view to see the various charges applied on the bill, for example, payment, adjustments, and so on. When the bill is subject to an unsettled dispute, then dispute badge is shown besides the bill ID.

About Bill Dispute

The disputed billing data are stored in your billing application. You don't need to create an manage a request to raise a bill dispute. You can directly initiate a bill dispute using the bill detail user interface.

Here's how you can raise a bill dispute:

• At the bill total level, click More > Dispute Bill Total.

• At the bill item level, click Action > Dispute Charge.

• At the bill item level, click Action > Dispute Events.

  The value of the Charge Before Dispute is the sum of the currency amount of the selected events.

You can't raise disputes on bills that have unsettled bill disputes or the total amount on the bill or bill item is zero.