8 Sending Invoices to Customers

Learn how to send invoices to customers by using Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM).

Topics in this document:

• Sending Invoices to Customers

• Setting the Maximum Invoice Size for Email

• Sending Invoices to Accounts That Use the Invoice Payment Method

• Sending Invoices to Accounts That Do Not Use the Invoice Payment Method

• Configuring the Email Data Manager for Printing

Sending Invoices to Customers

After generating invoices, you can email them to your customers or print them for postal mailing by using the pin_inv_send utility. The utility determines whether to email or print an account's invoice by reading the account's delivery preference, which is set by a CSR during account creation.

By default, the utility emails invoices in HTML format, but you can change the format to DOC1. For more information, see "pin_inv_send".

Setting the Maximum Invoice Size for Email

To set the maximum size of invoices that can be sent by email:

1. Open the invoice configuration file (BRM_home/apps/pin_inv/pin.conf).

2. Set the value of the inv_send_size entry in kilobytes and make sure it is not commented.

3. Save and close the file.

Sending Invoices to Accounts That Use the Invoice Payment Method

To email or print invoices for bills that use the Invoice payment method:

1. If you store invoices in a separate database schema, enter the database schema number in the invoicing configuration file (BRM_home/apps/pin_inv/pin.conf). For example:

   - pin_inv_send invoice_db 0.0.0.2 /invoice 0 

   Then follow the procedures in "Storing Invoices in a Separate Database Schema".

2. Start the Email Data Manager. See "Sending Email to Customers Automatically" in BRM Managing Customers.

3. Go to a directory with a valid invoicing configuration file. See "Connecting BRM Utilities" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.

4. Run the pin_inv_send utility by entering this command:

   pin_inv_send

   For a detailed description of this utility's syntax and parameters, see "pin_inv_send".

Sending Invoices to Accounts That Do Not Use the Invoice Payment Method

To email or print invoices for non-invoice bill units, run the pin_inv_send utility with the pay_type parameter:

pin_inv_send -pay_type id

For id, enter one payment method ID as shown in Table 8-1:

Table 8-1 Payment Method IDs

Payment method	ID
Undefined	0
Prepaid	10000
Invoice	10001
Debit	10002
Credit card	10003
Direct debit	10005
Smart card	10006
Nonpaying	10007
Beta	10008
Internal	10009
Guest	10010
Cash	10011
Check	10012
Wire transfer	10013
Payorder	10014
Postal order	10015
Voucher	10016
SEPA	10018

Configuring the Email Data Manager for Printing

You can use the third-party tool, HTML to PostScript converter (html2ps), to print invoices. Follow these instructions to download the html2ps tool and to configure the Email Data Manager (dm_email) for printing invoices:

1. Download from the Internet and install the html2ps converter tool.

2. Open the dm_email configuration file (BRM_home/sys/dm_email/pin.conf).

3. In the html2ps entry, enter the path to the html2ps tool.

   For example:

   - dm_email html2ps path_to_html2ps_tool
   

4. In the printer entry, enter the name of your printer:

   - dm_email printer printer_name 
   

5. In the tmp_dir entry, enter the name of the directory where BRM saves temporary HTML and PostScript files when the send utility runs. For example:

   - dm_email tmp_dir /tmp
   

6. Save and close the file.

7. Stop and restart the Email Data Manager.