Setting Up Bill Print Groups
Bill print groups allow you to categorize an account's service agreements into groups for bill print purposes.
Bill print groups are optional. Typically, only accounts with many SAs will use bill print groups because the standard bill print priority is sufficient for accounts with a limited number of SAs. Refer to SA Type - Billing for more information about the standard bill print priority.
Let's use an example to clarify the bill print group concept. Consider a local government's account. This account would have many service agreements (some for the police department, others for the court system, others for the department of public works, etc.).
If you don't create a bill print group for this customer, their bill segments will be printed in the order dictated by each segment's service agreement's SA type's bill print priority. If you create a bill print group for this customer, you can define the customer's desired categories (e.g., police, courts, DPW, etc.) and then link each of the account's SAs to the appropriate category.
Nomenclature. We refer to the categories under a bill print group as "subgroups". A bill print group can have an unlimited number of subgroups. When you create a subgroup, you define its relative bill print priority and the associated verbiage to print on the bill (assuming you print information about the subgroup on the bill).
We'd like to highlight the following characteristics of bill print groups:
- A bill print group is associated with a specific account. If multiple customers have the exact categorization preferences, you will have to set up multiple bill print groups.
- Over time, a customer could have many bill print groups. This would happen if a customer's bill categorization preferences change over time. We'd like to stress that while an account can have multiple bill print groups, only one will be used by the bill print process (the one effective on the bill date).
- Bill print groups only affect printed bills. Bill print groups do not affect the order in which service agreements appear on the bill maintenance transaction.
- If new service agreements are added after a bill print group is set up for an account, they will not be linked to a subgroup. If you neglect to link the new service agreements to one of the bill print group's subgroups they will be printed under the "default" subgroup (every bill print group must have one default subgroup to cater for this situation).
While the system supports the definition of bill print groups and the categorization of an account's service agreements into the various subgroups, the base package's bill print extract does NOT take advantage of this information.
The topics in this section describe how to set up a bill print group and how to link an account's service agreements to its subgroups.