Using Billable Charges For Pass Through / Convergent Billing

The term "pass through" billing is used to describe the practice of receiving charges calculated by third parties and presenting them on the customer's bill along with your own charges. "Pass through" billing is implemented in the system using Billable Charges.

The following points provide information to help you decide the most appropriate way to implement "pass through" billing given your specific requirements:

• Customers with pass through charges will need a separate contract to hold the pass through charges. We refer to this type of contract as a "billable charge" contract.

• A billable charge contract holds the billable charges until the customer is next billed. At that time, a separate bill segment will be created for each unbilled billable charge linked to the billable charge contract.
• While it is not required, we recommend creating a separate billable charge contract for each type of pass through charge.
• You can interface billable charges using the Billable Charge Interface. The interfaced charges can consist of any of the following:
  • Pre-calculated bill lines that will be presented "as is" to the customer.
  • Service quantities that are used by the system to calculate the charges on behalf of the third party.
  • All of the above. You might interface both bill lines and service quantities if the third party calculated the charges but did not calculate the taxes. The dollar amount for which taxes will be calculated would be defined using a service quantity.

• The bill lines on a billable charge can fit into any of the following categories:
  • Memo-only (i.e., don't affect the general ledger). A bill line that is memo-only contain information that is purely informational. You can use memo-only bill lines to show this information on the customer's bill. If a bill line is not memo-only (i.e., it affect the general ledger), a distribution code must also be specified to define how the lines affects the general ledger.
  • Show on the customer bill. It is possible to create bill lines that affect the general ledger, but are not shown on the customer's bill. This is an unusual practice, but it happens.
  • Summary / detail. Each bill line has an indication of whether it is a summary or detail line. This only impacts bill presentation.

• Characteristics (i.e., user-defined fields) can be associated with billable charge lines. You might populate this information if you are interfaced information that may be useful during bill presentation or for reporting purposes.
• If service quantities are specified on a billable charge, they are saved on the bill segment created when the billable charge is billed. This means that the system can support creation of a graph of historical usage on the bill, as well as other queries on customer usage. In addition, it might be possible to event estimate product/charge type consumption based on these service quantities (but such a plug-in is not supplied with the base package).

• Cancel / rebill for billable charges is quite different than for normal bill segments. A billable charge bill segment can be cancelled, and this will reverse the financial effects of the billable charge. But without new information from the source, there is no way to rebill the customer. Therefore, if the original charges were incorrect, the source system would send both a reversal of the charges and a newly revised set of information. These could be passed as two separate billable charges or they could combined on a single billable charge.
• For most other functionality, the billable charge contract supports the same functionality as normal contracts. This includes budget billing, payment distribution, credit & collection tracking and events, current & payoff balances, movement of old debt onto payment arrangements, etc.