Processing Sequence Considerations
You may have customers with a complex collection of contracts such that the calculation for one bill segment relies on information calculated by another bill segment for the same account. For example, perhaps you need to process your bill segments as follows:
- Step 1: Calculate bill segments for all the account's "single site" service agreements (i.e., each service agreement related to a single premise)
- Step 2: Calculate the bill segment for additional charges for the "head office" service agreement where the charges are based on the aggregated consumption of all premises from all bill segments (calculated in the first step).
To create the "head office" bill segment for the account, you must control the order in which the system creates the bill segments for each service agreement.
The SA type allows you to indicate a billing processing sequence that controls the order in which the service agreements are processed. The processing sequence is optional and service agreements are processed in ascending order of their SA type's billing processing sequence. As a result, SA Types with a processing sequence of zero are processed first, then 1, then 2, etc.
If you have sub SAs linked to a master SA, the billing processing sequence is used first to order the creation of bill segments for the master SAs. If you populate a processing sequence on an SA type for a sub SA, it is used to control the order in which the sub SAs for a given master SA are processed relative to each other. Refer to Designing Your SA Types And Start Options For Sub SAs for more information.
The billing processing sequence also controls the order of service agreements in the following other processes:
- Execution of pre bill completion algorithms. The system processes each service agreement in the billing processing sequence order. Within each service agreement, the pre bill completion algorithms on its SA type are processed in the order of the algorithm's sequence.
- Execution of bill completion algorithms. The system processes each service agreement in the billing processing sequence order. Within each service agreement, the completion algorithms on its SA type are processed in the order of the algorithm's sequence.
- Interval Data Creation. For interval service agreements linked to interval profiles with profile creation algorithms defined, the system processes each service agreement in the processing sequence order. Within each service agreement, the data creation algorithms are processed in the order of the creation priority on the profile type.