New Features in Billing Care

Billing Care Now Uses the Helidon Runtime

Billing Care now uses Helidon as its primary application runtime. This runtime replaces the deployment model based on WebLogic Server and Fusion Middleware. The Helidon-based architecture removes dependencies on WebLogic-specific platform services and provides a lightweight runtime for Billing Care.

Billing Care uses Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) to manage dependencies across its REST resource, module, and worker layers. CDI provides container-managed dependency injection and lifecycle management. These capabilities improve modularity and simplify application maintenance. To customize APIs, use the CDI @Specializes annotation to override standard Billing Care implementations. This approach replaces the previous customization mechanism based on the customModule.properties file. If you have existing API customizations, review them and update your implementations to use the CDI-based extension model.

Billing Care replaces the Java logging API (java.util.logging) with SLF4J and Log4j2. By default, the new logging framework uses asynchronous logging. Security and audit events use synchronous logging. In on-premises deployments, you can separate logs into functional, access, security, audit, and performance log files. In cloud native deployments, Billing Care writes logs to standard output (STDOUT) for collection by the platform's logging infrastructure.

The new deployment model supports both on-premises and cloud native environments. In cloud native environments, the deployment model supports containerized application artifacts and deployment on Kubernetes.

Billing Care functionality and BRM integration interfaces are designed to remain compatible with the previous deployment model. The Helidon-based security architecture supports OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect and can integrate with customer identity providers for single sign-on.

The Billing Care REST API also includes the new operation listed in Table 5-1 to support the Helidon-based architecture.

Table 5-1 New Helidon-Based Operation

Operation	Method	Path
Get Permitted Routes	GET	/authorization

Note:

Detailed documentation for this feature is not yet available and will be published in a subsequent documentation update. For additional information or assistance, please contact Oracle Support.

Billing Care Now Supports External Application Configuration

Starting with Billing Care 16.26.0, you can modify supported product configuration settings by using external application configuration. You do not need to rebuild or redeploy a custom Billing Care JAR file.

Previously, customers typically managed custom configuration settings in the CustomConfigurations.xml file as part of an SDK customization. Billing Care now uses the Helidon configuration framework. The configurations.yaml file defines the default product settings. To override supported product settings, provide an external configurations.yaml file that contains only the values you need to change.

External application configuration supports both on-premises and cloud native deployments. It also simplifies configuration maintenance and upgrades.

If you upgrade from an earlier release, you must convert your existing settings in the CustomConfigurations.xml file to the YAML-based configuration model. Billing Care provides migration utilities to help convert configuration settings and update customization code.

You can also define customer-specific configuration settings under billingcare.configuration.ext.

Note:

Detailed documentation for this feature is not yet available and will be published in a subsequent documentation update. For additional information or assistance, please contact Oracle Support.

Promotion Management in Billing Care

Billing Care now supports managing promotions for accounts and services. Customer service representatives (CSRs) can use the new Profiles work area to view, create, edit, and delete account-level and service-level promotion profiles for an account.

Promotions can grant discounts, special rates, or free resources. Promotions can be triggered by BRM events or actions, such as purchases and top-ups, or by date-based profile values, such as special dates.

Billing Care lists the promotion profiles associated with an account and its services, including active, future-dated, expired, and canceled profiles when they are available in BRM. Access to promotion actions is controlled by Billing Care role configuration.

For more information, see "Subscriber Preferences and Promotions" in Billing Care Online Help.

Tie Discount Offers to Specific Charge Offers in Billing Care UI

Billing Care now supports associating discount offers with specific charge offers directly in the Billing Care UI. You can set the association when creating an account, purchasing a new service, adding a bundle to an existing service, transitioning packages, or customizing rates for purchased offers.

When configuring products and discounts, you can select or enter an offer association ID (tie ID) for eligible product and discount offers. Billing Care can reuse IDs entered during the current purchase flow, IDs already persisted on subscribed offers, and IDs from discounts shared by a sharing owner. You can also view, set, change, or clear an offer association ID in the UI.

Note:

If a discount offer is not configured as tieable in PDC, the association field is unavailable.

For more information, see "Creating an Account", "Purchasing New Products and Services", "Purchasing Add-On Products", "Transitioning Bundles and Packages", "Customizing an Offer's Rate" in Billing Care Online Help.

Billing Care Now Localizes Currency and Number Formats

Billing Care now uses Oracle JET number converters to standardize the formatting of currency amounts, percentages, and quantities. Currency formatting follows the selected locale’s standard accounting rules, so the placement of currency symbols and the presentation of negative values can vary by language. For example, negative values may use parentheses in some locales and a minus sign in others.

See "About Currency and Number Formats" in Billing Care Online Help.

In addition, the following public JavaScript methods have been deprecated. If they are used in your Billing Care custom code, you must plan to migrate it to use the new NumberUtil functions.

formatNumber
convertAmountPositiveToNegative
convertAmountNegativeToPositive
formatAmount
unformatAmount
formatAmountWithAbbr
formatAmountWithoutSymbol
performAmountFormatting
reverseSignAndFormatAmount
unformatPaymentAmount
reformatAmountAndReverseSign
parseAmountBasedOnLocale
unformatLocaleAmountToFloat
amountComparator

See "Migrating Number and Currency Formatting Customizations" in Billing Care SDK Guide.

Event Browser Now in Billing Care

Billing Care now includes Event Browser, which lets CSRs search for and investigate BRM events directly in Billing Care. In previous releases, the Event Browser was in Customer Center.

CSRs can search for events by using account, bill, service, and event information, such as customer name and status, bill or item number, service ID and type, event type, and event creation or effective time. Event Browser displays matching events and provides detailed event information and related account, service, bill, item, and accounts receivable (A/R) information.

CSRs can also perform A/R actions while investigating an event.

The Billing Care REST API now also includes the Get Item Details and Get Event Types operations and enhances the Get Events operation to support flexible event searches and selective result fields.

For more information, see "Event Browser" in Billing Care Online Help and REST API Reference for Billing Care.

Enhancements to Payment Browser in Billing Care

Billing Care now includes Payment Center functionality for searching and managing payments in Payment Browser, previously known as Payment Suspense. You can find and manage suspended, fully recycled; suspended, partially recycled; suspended; and active payments without navigating into individual customer accounts. Billing Care also includes enhancements for allocating and undoing payment allocations, moving eligible payments to suspense, reversing payments, and permanently removing unallocated payment amounts.

For more information, see "Payment Browser" in Billing Care Online Help.

The Billing Care REST API also includes the new operations listed in Table 5-2 to support the payment browser functionality.

Table 5-2 New Payment Browser-Based Operations

Category	Operation	Method	Endpoint Path
Batch Payments	Get Automatic Batch Payments Status	GET	/batchpayments/autoprocess
Payments	Get Payment Records	GET	/payments

For more information, see REST API Reference for Billing Care.

AI Agent and MCP Support for Bill Explanations in Billing Care

You can now use the BRM Billing Agent to ask questions about an account’s bills through a chat interface. The Billing Care Model Context Protocol (MCP) server gives the agent approved access to account, bill, bill item, and accounts receivable information. The agent uses that information to answer questions about recent bills and charges. You can configure the AI agent endpoint that Billing Care uses.

For more information, see BRM AI Services Framework Overview.

The Billing Care REST API also includes the new operation listed in Table 5-3 to support the AI agent and MCP server.

Table 5-3 New Operation in Billing Care REST API

Operation	Method	Path
Access MCP Tools and Resources	POST	/bcws/webresources/v1.0/mcp

For more information, see REST API Reference for Billing Care.

Billing Care Now Supports Bill History Searches

In Billing Care, you can now search bill history by using Bill Search. Previously, Bill Search searched only current bills. After a corrective bill was generated, you could not find the corrected bill by searching for the original bill number.

To include bill history in a search, select the Include Original Bill option. Billing Care searches both current bills and bill history. If the search matches an original bill or an earlier corrective bill, Billing Care returns the latest corrected bill.

Note:

Detailed documentation for this feature is not yet available and will be published in a subsequent documentation update. For additional information or assistance, please contact Oracle Support.

Billing Care Now Uses Oracle JET for UI String Localization

Starting with Billing Care 16.26.0, Billing Care uses the Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (Oracle JET) localization framework for UI strings. The new framework replaces the previous Oracle i18n (orai18n) localization framework.

Billing Care uses Oracle JET translation bundles to manage localized UI labels and messages. The localization framework provides the l10n.getLocalizedValue() utility to retrieve translated strings. This utility replaces the previous approach of accessing generated JavaScript resource objects.

If you have customized Billing Care UI localization, you must convert your existing XLF-based custom translation resources to Oracle JET translation bundles. You must also update your custom JavaScript code to use the l10n.getLocalizedValue() utility.

Billing Care provides the localization-code migration utility to help update legacy localization references in custom code. The utility does not generate Oracle JET translation bundles. You must convert your custom translation resources separately.

Note:

Detailed documentation for this feature is not yet available and will be published in a subsequent documentation update. For additional information or assistance, please contact Oracle Support.

Billing Care Now Supports Agreements

In the Billing Care UI, you can now create agreements and associate them with customer accounts. Agreements let you define customer-specific commercial terms, such as negotiated prices and overrides of product characteristics.

When you create an agreement, you can search for bundles or packages and add charge and discount offers. You can also configure the available price tags and product characteristics for those offers.

Note:

Detailed documentation for this feature is not yet available and will be published in a subsequent documentation update. For additional information or assistance, please contact Oracle Support.

The Billing Care REST API also includes the new operations listed in Table 5-4 to support agreements.

Table 5-4 New Agreements-Based Operations

Endpoint Name	Method	Path
Create Agreement	POST	/agreements
Get Agreement	GET	/agreements/{id}
Get Agreement State Map	GET	/agreements/lifecyclestates
Get Agreements Associated with an Account	GET	/agreements/association/account/{id}
Search Agreements	GET	/agreements
Update Agreement	PATCH	/agreements/{agreementId}
Get Agreement Offer Details	GET	/subscriptions/agreement/offer/{id}
Get Offers for Purchase	GET	/subscriptions/offers

For more information, see REST API Reference for Billing Care.

Billing Care REST API Now Supports Promotion Profile Management

The Billing Care REST API has been enhanced to support promotion profile management. You can use the profile APIs to view, create, update, and delete /profile/acct_extrating and /profile/serv_extrating profile objects for promotions.

Table 5-5 shows the new promotion profile management operation in the Billing Care REST API.

Table 5-5 New Promotion Profile Management Operation

Operation	Method	Path
Get Promotion Type (ERA) Strings	GET	/profiles/promotiontypes/{id}

The {id} path parameter identifies the profile owner type, such as an account or a service type. Use this endpoint to retrieve the promotion profile types available for that owner type. Use the optional locale query parameter to retrieve localized promotion profile type names and descriptions when the corresponding localized strings are configured in BRM.

For more information, see REST API Reference for Billing Care.

Billing Care REST API Now Supports Billing Simulation

The Billing Care REST API now supports billing simulation, enabling you to evaluate the potential billing impact of subscription and pricing changes before implementing them.

You can use the Billing Care REST API to check whether an account is eligible for billing simulation, register simulation requests for one or more accounts, and execute synchronous billing simulations. You can register simulation requests for a specific bill or billing period and specify alternative offers for simulation.

Note:

Detailed documentation for this feature is not yet available and will be published in a subsequent documentation update. For additional information or assistance, please contact Oracle Support.

The Billing Care REST API also includes the new operations listed in Table 5-6 to support billing simulation.

Table 5-6 New Billing Simulation Operations

Operation	Method	Path
Evaluate Bill Simulation Eligibility	POST	/bills/simulation/evaluate
Register Bill Simulations	POST	/bills/simulation/register
Simulate a Bill	POST	/bills/simulation/simulate

The Billing Care REST API uses the existing authentication and authorization framework to control access to these operations. Billing calculations are performed by BRM.

For more information, see REST API Reference for Billing Care.

5 New Features in Billing Care