Billable Charge Segmentation

You create a billable charge whenever a customer should be charged for a service that occurs outside the normal course of business. For example, you would create a billable charge to charge a contractor for the repair of a ruptured gas line. You can also use billable charges to "pass through" other bill ready charges generated outside the system, by another application, or by a 3rd party supplier.

A billable charge must reference a service agreement. This service agreement behaves just like any other service agreement:

• Bill segments are created for the service agreement. Whenever billing is performed for an account with billable charge service agreements, the system creates a bill segment for each service agreement with unbilled charges. If multiple unbilled charges exist for a given service agreement, only one bill segment will be created and it will contain details about all of the billable charges.
• Payments are distributed to the service agreement. Payments made by an account are distributed to its billable charge service agreements just like any other service agreement.
• Overdue debt is monitored. The credit and collections process monitors billable charge service agreements for overdue debt and responds accordingly when overdue debt is detected.

Therefore, you must set up at least one SA type to hold your billable charge debt. You may have multiple charges based on billing frequencies, A/R booking, debt monitoring, etc. It's really up to you.

The easiest way to determine how many billable charge SA types you'll need is to define every conceivable billable charge (which you should have done when you designed your billable charge templates). Then ask yourself if they have the same billing and payment behavior, if so, you'll have one SA type. If not, you'll need one SA type for each combination.

We will assume your billable charges are all used to levy unusual one-off charges that can be collected in the same way, therefore we'll need one SA type.

Notice the following about the new one time SA type:

• It has a normal receivable distribution code.
• Its debt class is unregulated.
• It uses an interesting bill segment type - BILLCHRG. This bill segment type was set up to create bill segments using billable charges.
• It references the valid billable charge templates that can be used on this SA type.

Notice the following about the pass through SA Type:

• It doesn't use the normal distribution code or debt class. This is done so that the debt and receivable can be tracked separately. If these charges were being pass through from another system, you might want to track these financial values separately.
• It still uses the normal bill segment type - BILLCHRG. From a billing perspective, there is no difference between this and the one time SA Type.
• Templates are not relevant - these charges on not created on-line using templates, but are loaded via the Billable Charge Upload Staging.

Notice the following about the add on charges SA Type:

• This is an example of bill-ready charges (similar to pass through) to which the system adds on other charges, for example, taxes.
• It still uses the normal bill segment type - BILLCHRG. From a billing perspective, there is no difference between this and the one time SA Type.
• It also uses a Rate. In this case, the bill creation algorithm (specified on the bill segment type) will take any billable charge lines and attach them to a bill. In addition, these billable charges will include billable charge service quantities (SQs). These service quantities will also be swept onto the bill segment, and the Rate (TAXES in this example) will be applied. In order for taxes to be calculated, the billable charge SQs must include the total taxable amount - the system is not able to apply the rate on top of the other billable charges. But, it can apply the tax rate to the SQs that are supplied.
  • You can also use this technique to bill other rate-ready service quantities, like kWh, CCF, etc. This is a way to process rate-ready data for which you have a contract, but you do not know the meter (and therefore, cannot collect real meter reads).
  • If the rate has pre-processing calculation groups, these will be applied as well.