Deposits Issues

Deposits should be held using normal deposit service agreements (SAs). You should NOT use the Sub Service Agreements (sub SA) functionality to hold or bill for deposits because deposit service agreements do not have the same state transition as do master SAs (e.g., you can activate or stop a deposit independent from its master).

However sub SAs can be covered by a deposit. If so, their SA type must reference a deposit class. To make the point, let's examine a few scenarios:

• Assume you have a sub SA for your own charges (this can happen when we use sub SAs to unbundle charges from the Master SA). In this case, it is likely that the sub SA and master SA will be in the same deposit class. This means that a single deposit SA would cover both the master and the sub SA.
• Assume They Bill For Us (Bill or Rate Ready). In this situation, we still have a master SA for our charges and we transfer the charges to the service provider who does the billing. In this case, it is likely that we would be holding the deposit for the service provider, not on the end-use customer. If we are in a situation where 1) we cannot hold a deposit against the service provider, and/or 2) we are not assured of the service provider paying us when the customer doesn't pay them, then we might want to put the master SA in a deposit class and hold a deposit against the customer's account using a normal deposit SA. We would not expect the service provider to bill the customer for the deposit, so we don't need a sub SA. We bill the customer directly for the deposit using our normal deposit SA.
• Assume We Bill For Them (Bill or Rate Ready). In this situation, we could hold a normal deposit SA for the customer's master SA. For sub SAs, we have two scenarios:
  • We pay at billing time. Since we purchase the receivable, we would want to increase our normal deposit to cover the Sub SA. To do this, the sub SA's SA type's deposit class should be the same as our master SA's deposit class.
  • We pay at payment time. It seems unlikely that we would want to hold a deposit on behalf of a service provider when we don't purchase the receivable. However, it is possible to do so by putting the sub SA into its own deposit class. If you did this, the system will require a separate deposit SA for the service provider's deposit. The system would calculate and refund such deposits using the algorithms defined on the new deposit SA's SA type's deposit class. It's important to be aware that the deposit is not held with respect to the specific service provider. Rather, it is just held in the system as separate deposit that could be used for any service agreement that belongs to its deposit class.