Managing Account and Service Status

6 Managing Account and Service Status

Learn how to change account and service status in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM).

Topics in this document:

For basic information about account status, see "About Activating, Inactivating, and Closing Accounts" in BRM Concepts.

Automatically Inactivating and Closing Accounts

By default, BRM automatically inactivates accounts in the following situations:

A credit card payment fails because a nonvalid credit card is used.
A credit card validation fails, and the item is 30 or more days past due.
The account is a child account with a nonpaying bill unit (/billinfo object), and the parent account is inactivated.

Note:

By default, account status is not changed when a credit limit is reached. However, also by default, service authorization requires that the credit limit has not been reached, so reaching a credit limit prevents a customer from using a service.

To change these defaults, you must customize the following policy opcodes:

PCM_OP_PYMT_POL_COLLECT
PCM_OP_ACT_POL_EVENT_LIMIT
PCM_OP_ACT_POL_SPEC_VERIFY

Note:

When you close an account or service, you cannot schedule reactivation. Closed accounts and services must be reactivated manually.

See BRM Opcode Guide for more information.

Scheduling Status Changes in Advance

In Billing Care or Customer Center, you can schedule account and service status changes for a future date. You use a daily billing utility, pin_deferred_act, to change the status automatically on the scheduled date.

You can schedule the following types of actions to occur on a future date by:

Changing the status of an account or service.
Adding an account to a hierarchy.
Removing an account from a hierarchy.
Moving an account between hierarchies.

After an action is deferred, you can display, run, reschedule, and cancel the deferred action.

Scheduling account reactivation works differently for inactivating and closing:

When you inactivate an account or service, you can set a future date to reactivate the account or service, or you can reactivate the account or service manually.
When you close an account or service, you cannot schedule reactivation. Closed accounts and services must be reactivated manually.

Use the pin_bill_day script to run the pin_deferred_act utility daily. To ensure that the account status is correct before running billing, it is the first billing utility run by the pin_bill_day script. See "pin_deferred_act".

Changing Start Times for Reactivated Charge and Discount Offers

By default, when inactive charge and discount offers are reactivated, their purchase, usage, and cycle start times are changed to the current (reactivation) date. You can use the Connection Manager (CM) configuration file change_start_time_on_activation entry to change this behavior so that when inactive charge and discount offers are reactivated, the original purchase, usage, and cycle start times are kept.

This setting does not affect charge offers whose purchase is deferred to a later date. If the charge offer is reactivated before the purchase date, the original purchase, usage, and cycle start times are kept, even if this option is enabled.

Note:

The purchase and cycle start times determine the date on which the purchase and cycle charges begin to be applied to the charge and discount offers.

To keep the original purchase, usage, and cycle start times:

Open the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf), where BRM_home is the directory in which the BRM server software is installed.
Add the following entry:
```
-fm_bill change_start_time_on_activation value
```
where value is one of the following:
- 0 keeps the original purchase, usage, and cycle start times.
- 1 changes the purchase, usage, and cycle start times to the reactivation date. This is the default.
Save and close the file.
Stop and restart the CM.

Allowing Active Services with Inactive Accounts

By default, inactivating an account inactivates all services owned by the account. To allow inactive accounts to have active services, use the allow_active_service_with_inactive_account entry in the CM pin.conf file.

To allow active services with inactive accounts:

Open the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf).
Add the following entry:
```
-fm_cust allow_active_service_with_inactive_account value
```
where value is one of the following:
- 0 prohibits active services with inactive accounts. This is the default.
- 1 allows inactive accounts to have active services.
Save and close the file.
Stop and restart the CM.

Inactivating and Closing Accounts in Hierarchies

Changing the status of an account in an account hierarchy changes the status of all accounts inside and outside the account hierarchy that have at least one nonpaying bill unit whose paying parent bill unit is owned by the initially changed account.

For more information, see "How Account Status Changes Affect Hierarchies".

You cannot prevent the status of a nonpaying child bill unit from changing when its parent bill unit's status changes.

Note:

Changing the account status of a child account does not affect the status of its parent.

Reusing Login Names and Passwords from Closed Accounts or Canceled Services

By default, you cannot reuse the login name of a closed account or canceled service, although BRM has no restriction on reusing passwords.

To reuse login names, set up BRM to automatically modify the login name when you close an account. For example, you could have the string #CLOSED# prepended to the login name.

You can customize the PCM_OP_CUST_POL_PREP_STATUS policy opcode to automatically add characters to a login name when an account's status changes.