Billing Relationships

When you set up a service provider, you must define your organization's billing relationship with the service provider. The following points provide examples of the billing relationships supported in the system,

  • If you are an energy supply company, you may provide billing services for the distribution company. This means that your bill contains both your charges and the distribution company's charges. We refer to this as the We Bill For Them billing relationship.
  • Alternatively, the distribution company may provide billing services for you. This means that the distribution company's bill contains your charges and their charges. We refer to this as the They Bill For Us billing relationship.
  • Alternatively, you may both send bills to the customer. We refer to this as the Dual Billing relationship.
  • Alternatively, if you subcategorize your services OR if your company provides one of the services that is provided by your service providers, then the system will create a separate bill segment for the subcategory of service. We refer to this as the It's Us billing relationship.

If you provide billing services for another service provider (i.e., you bill for them), there are two ways to determine the service provider's charges:

  • You can load the service provider's rates in your system and calculate the charges for the service provider. We call this the Rate Ready calculation method.
  • You can let the service provider calculate their own charges and interface them to you. We call this the Bill Ready calculation method.

If a service provider provides billing services for you (i.e., they bill for you):

  • If the service provider has a suitable CIS system, they can load your rates in their system and calculate your charges for you. We call this the Rate Ready calculation method.
  • You can calculate your charges and interface them to them. We call this the Bill Ready calculation method.

If you don't have a billing relationship with a service provider, you still need a service provider record to define such. Why? Because the system needs to know that it doesn't have to worry about a particular service provider in respect of billing. In addition, you may have other interactions with a service provider that have nothing to do with billing, e.g., you may send or receive consumption.

The topics in this section provide a wealth of information about the various billing relationships and the ramifications of each.