How The System Determines How Much Was Consumed

There are two types of service agreements:

• Those that charge for some commodity (e.g., electricity, water, garbage, street lighting).
• Those that charge for something intangible (e.g., deposit, charitable contribution, payment arrangement).

For service agreements that charge for something intangible, there is no notion of determining how much was consumed and therefore the topics in this section are not relevant. For service agreements that charge for a commodity, the first step in the creation of a bill segment is the determination of how much was consumed. For example,

• If the service agreement bills for electricity, the system must determine how much electricity was consumed.
• If the service agreement bills for lamp service, the system must determine how many lamps the customer uses.

After the system determines how much was consumed during the bill period, it saves the consumption on the bill segment in the following snapshots:

• The meter read snapshot contains information about the meter reads that were used to determine consumption for metered service points.
• The item snapshot contains information about the items that existed at the service points.
• The service quantity snapshot contains the billable service quantities that were derived using the meter read and item snapshots.

The topics in this section describe how each of the above snapshots is built.