Initial Consumption Period Considerations

Bill segments produced for a service agreement have two time periods:

• The bill segment period. The bill segment period defines the entire period of time covered by a bill segment's charges.
• The consumption period. The consumption period defines the period of time used to calculate the number of days for daily charges.

The consumption period almost always starts one day after the bill segment period. The consumption period always ends on the bill segment's end date. For example, a bill segment period that spans 5-Jan-2002 through 6-Feb-2002 will almost always have a corresponding consumption period of 6-Jan-2002 through 6-Feb-2002. The reason that the start dates don't match is because a bill segment's start date equals the end date of the prior bill segment (i.e., the start date was already counted in the previous bill segment's consumption period and we don't want to count it twice).

The only time when the previous paragraph isn't true is the first bill segment that's produced for a new service agreement. This is because different utilities count the first day of a new service agreement differently than others. Because of this, a flag exists on SA Type called Initial Start Date Option. This flag controls whether the service agreement's start date is included in the consumption period in a service agreement's first bill segment.

The following table describes the ramifications of the options you can set for this flag.

The example below shows how the consumption period would be calculated with the various options for a customer who starts service on January 1.

There may be SA types for which the value of this flag does not affect the consumption period calculation and still other SA types where this flag is never used. For example,

• For billable charge service agreements, the consumption period is equal to the start and end dates on the billable charge and therefore this flag is not applicable.
• A sub SA either inherits the consumption period from the master SA or it uses billable charges. As a result, billing does not use this flag.
• For some service agreements, the charges on the rate are not affected by the consumption period. For example, if you have a customer with a simple meter and a simple usage-based charge, billing calculates the amount of consumption between the start reading and end reading and applies the rate (i.e., the number of days in the consumption period doesn't impact the charges in some rates).
• Some service agreements are not billed, for example, overpayment service agreements. For this type of service agreement and other types of service agreements that are not billed, this flag is not applicable. However, the system does not prevent a value from being entered in these cases to allow for an implementation process to use the flag if needed.

Setting this flag to an appropriate value is significant for certain types of service agreements.

• For services whose rate includes daily charges, the configuration of this flag may impact the first bill segment for the service agreement. For example, if the first bill period is October 1st through October 31st, do you consider consumption period to be 31 days or 30 days? How you want to bill the customer on the first bill determines how you set this flag.
• For interval billing service agreements, the interval usage recordings typically begin on the first day of service. If you add 1 to the start date, you miss billing for intervals on the first day. In this case, you should set the value to Add 1 Day for Back-to-back.