Defining Logical Criteria

When you setup an eligibility criterion, you must define two things:

• The field to be compared
• The comparison method

You have the following choices in respect of identifying the field to be compared:

• You can retrieve a characteristic value linked to any of the following:
• The service agreement being billed
• The service agreement's account
• The main person linked to the service agreement's account
• The characteristic premise linked to the service agreement
• One of the service points linked to the service agreement
• In addition, you can use a characteristic value that is derived while the rate is being calculated (characteristic values can be created by SQ rules, register rules and many other rate component algorithms)
• You can retrieve the value of a given service quantity
• You can retrieve the final value of an earlier rate component
• You can execute an algorithm to retrieve a field value from someplace else in the system. This is a very powerful feature, but it's not terribly intuitive. We'll present a few examples later in this section to illustrate the power of this approach.

You have the following choices in respect of identifying the comparison method:

• You can choose an operator (e.g., >, <, =, BETWEEN, IN, etc.) and a comparison value.
• You can execute an algorithm that performs the comparison (and returns TRUE, FALSE or INSUFFICIENT DATA). This is also a very powerful feature, but it's not terribly intuitive. We'll present a few examples later in this section to illustrate the power of this approach.

The Examples Of Rate Component Eligibility Rules provide examples to help you understand this design.