Service Agreements (SAs)

Think of a service agreement as a contract between your company and a customer. The service agreement contains the terms and conditions controlling how the system calculates charges for the specific service supplied to the customer.

Every account should have at least one service agreement (otherwise, the account has no financial obligations with your company). There is no limit to the number of service agreements that may be linked to an account. However, most residential customers have X service agreements where X is the number of services sold by your company. For example, if your company sells both electricity and gas, most accounts will have two service agreements.

A separate service agreement is required for every service supplied to every account. Why? Because a variety of fields may differ for each service agreement:

• Obviously, the price of the service is different.
• The credit and collection criteria may be different.
• The general ledger account to which the resultant revenue and/or receivable are linked is different.
• The sales tax could be different for each good / service / location.
• The service point measuring consumption will frequently be different.
• The list goes on...

Service agreements that bill for premise-based services are linked to one or more premises via their service points. When you link a service point to a service agreement, you are telling the system that the service agreement's account will pay for the service point's service.