Maintaining Billable Charges
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.
Billable charges can be uploaded from an external system. Refer to Uploading Billable Charges and Using Billable Charges For Pass Through Billing for more information.
A billable charge must refer to 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 billable charge. This means that if a service agreement has many unbilled billable charges, it will have many bill segments.
- 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.
- This service agreement must reference an SA Type that has a Special Role of Billable Charge. If such a service agreement does not already exist for the account, one must be created before you can levy a billable charge. See "For more information" at the end of this section for links to other sections that will help you with this process.
Billable charge templates exist to minimize the effort required to create a billable charge for a customer. A billable charge template contains the standard bill lines, amounts and distribution codes used to charge for a one-off charge.
A user may override the information on the template when the billable charge is created. For example, you can create a billable charge template to levy charges when a contractor ruptures a gas main. This template would contain the bill lines, amounts and distribution codes associated with a ruptured pipe repair. Then, when a contractor ruptures a line, a user can create a billable charge using the template and override the amount to reflect the actual repair amount (if it differs from the norm).
Templates aren't required. A billable charge can be created without a template for a truly unexpected charge. If you don't use a template, you'll have to enter the bill information manually.
Refer to Setting Up Billable Charge Templates for more information.
Adding taxes and other calculation lines to a billable charge. Refer to Billable Charge - SQ Details for information about how to have the system calculate tax lines and append them to the billable charge.