Account - Budget

The Budget page contains information about all contracts linked to an account that are eligible to participate in a budget billing plan. Refer to Budget Billing for more information about how this information affects the account's bills.

Note: You are actually changing contracts. When you change a contract's budget amount on this page, you are actually changing the contract's recurring charge amount. Refer to Contract - Recurring Charge for more information.

Note: Eligible contracts. It's important to be aware that some contracts linked to an account may not be eligible for budget plans. For example, assume you have a customer with a deposit contract and one or more utility contracts. This customer will be billed for their deposit regardless of the utility contracts' budget amounts. You define whether a contract may participate in a budget plan on the contract's contract type.

Open Customer Management, Account and navigate to the Budget tab to view this information.

Description of Page

The appearance and dialogue of this page differs slightly for an account with a small number of contracts (100 or less) versus a large number of contracts (more than 100).

For an account with a small number of contracts, the user may click the Recommend Budget button to generate a New Budget for each contract. At that point the contract's budget amount has not been updated. The user may review the calculated amounts; make desired changes and then click Save to update the budget amount for the contracts.

CAUTION: You must save the page in order for the budget changes to take affect.

For an account with a large number of contracts, the user may click the Calculate and Apply New Budget button. At that point the system will calculate the recommended budget and update the Budget Amount on all the eligible contracts. To change the budget amount for one or more of the contracts, the user navigates to the contract page using the drill down button adjacent to the contract in question.

Click Cancel Budget to have the system set the New Budget amount to zero for all the account's contracts on budget.

Note: Budget Recommendation. Though this page lists all contracts eligible for a budget, the budget recommendation only calculates a budget amount for contracts whose start and end date (if any) includes the budget date. Additionally, the budget date is used to select the rate schedule that is in effect for an contract if estimating consumption is necessary.

Budget Plan controls how the account's debt is managed for budget-related purposes. Specifically, it controls how the recommended budget amount is calculated and how / when the customer's budget is periodically changed.

Note: Budget plan defaults based on the account's customer class / division combination.

Use New Budget Date to define the effective date of any changes to the customer's budget amount (this date is the effective date on the respective contracts' recurring charge history).

The system displays the sum of the contracts' current budget amounts in Total Budget Amount.

For accounts with a small number of contracts, the system displays the sum of the contracts' new budget amounts in Total New Budget.

The grid that follows contains a row for each contract linked to the account that is eligible to participate in a budget billing plan:

Contract Information This is a concatenation of basic information about the contract.

Last Changed Date This is the date when the contract's budget amount (i.e., recurring charge amount) was last changed.

Budget Amount This is the existing budget amount (i.e., recurring charge amount) for the contract.

New Budget For accounts with a small number of contracts, the contract's budget amount (i.e., recurring charge amount) will be changed to reflect this value when the page is changed. The effective date of the change is defined in New Budget Date.