Designing Rate Components
Rate components are the fundamental building blocks of your bill calculation algorithms. All of the other rate and bill factor set up tasks are done in preparation of the creation of these records. This means that you must design your rate components before you can design bill factors, register rules, SQ rules, SQ identifiers, eligibility rules. We strongly recommend that you design "on paper" how every rate component looks on every rate schedule before you attempt to set up any of the rate control tables.
All of the calculation details and financial information that appear on a bill segment are derived using information on rate components. If you want to see the results of what rate components do, refer to Bill Segment - Calc Lines.
There are innumerable ways to design rate components for a given rate. Some designs will result in easy long-term maintenance; others will result in maintenance headaches. In this section, we provide information to help you understand the ramifications of the various options. Before you set up your production rate components, we encourage you to gain intuitive understanding of these options by using the system to prototype the alternatives.
The topics in this section provide background information that will facilitate the construction of your rate components.