About Invoicing

About Invoices

An invoice lists the balance information for a customer's bill.

When billing runs, a bill is produced for every bill unit (/billinfo object) in an account, and invoices are generated for each bill. You can use two invoice types: detailed and summary.

A detailed invoice lists the bill items and the events. The detailed invoice mode is the default.

Note:

Generating detailed invoices requires more system processing and may slow performance.
A summary invoice lists only the bill items and not the events.

For bill units in hierarchies, the billing data for each nonpaying bill unit is rolled up to the invoice for the paying bill unit. This invoice is referred to as a consolidated invoice because it contains the billing data for the nonpaying bill units in addition to the billing data for the paying bill unit.

Note:

If you use detailed invoices, generating the consolidated invoice can be system intensive, and the consolidated invoice can be extremely large. Therefore, you can set invoicing thresholds to control the size of the consolidated invoice and the nonpaying data contained in it. See "Invoicing for Hierarchical Bill Units".

A typical invoice includes this information:

Charge summary and usage details. The breakdown of usage charges includes the gross usage charges and applicable discounts and taxes. For example, if the net usage charge is $355.08, the invoice document displays the breakdown as: Gross Charge: 348, Discount: (25.20), and Tax: 32.28.
Service usage details.
Past due amount details from the previous bill.
Hierarchical account details.
Promotion names.
A/R actions having currency or noncurrency impact, such as adjustment, dispute, settlement, and write-off details.

You can customize the content of invoices; for example, include a customer service phone number. You can also use templates to customize the appearance of the invoice.

You can also customize, enrich, and present BRM invoices by using the capabilities of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. See "Designing and Generating Invoices in Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher".

About the Invoicing Process

Use the pin_inv_accts utility to generate regular invoices for regular bills and corrective invoices for corrective bills.

For regular bills, run invoicing each day for accounts that had a regular bill created by the pin_bill_accts utility.

If you miss any billing days, the pin_inv_accts utility still generates invoices for accounts whose billing day was missed. This is because the pin_bill_accts utility creates bills for the missed billing days, and the pin_inv_accts utility generates invoices for those bills as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1 Invoices Created when Running pin_inv_accts

Description of "Figure 1-1 Invoices Created when Running pin_inv_accts"

For corrective bills, you run generate a corrective invoice when you create the corrective bill using the pin_make_corrective_bill utility.

BRM performs the following operations to generate invoices:

BRM creates a bill for each account bill unit when it runs the pin_bill_accts utility as part of the daily billing script. BRM needs a bill before generating an invoice.
BRM generates an invoice for each bill.
BRM stores all invoices either in the BRM database schema that contains the invoiced accounts or in a separate invoice-only schema that you set up.

After an invoice is generated:

You can display the invoice in Billing Care, Customer Center, and Self-Care Manager. The invoice's format is based on a template you create and load.
You can send the invoice to your customer in email, or as a printed invoice.
You can export the invoice as an XML, HTML, or DOC1 file.

Understanding Invoice Layout

The invoice examples used here are based on the invoice template for individual accounts provided in the BRM-BI Publisher integration package.

Note:

By default, the invoice document presents charges in primary currency. However, all the relevant charges details are available in secondary currency in the /invoice object. You can customize the RTF files associated with the layout templates to display the charges details in secondary currency.

The layout of a typical invoice generated using BRM-Business Intelligence Publisher integration application displays details in the following sections:

Standard Details

This section of the invoice includes the following information:

Basic bill information, such as invoice date, invoice number, account number, due date, and bill period. The invoice displays this bill-related information on all the pages.
Customer information, such as name and billing address. For hierarchical accounts, the invoice displays parent account information in this section.
Amount due, which is a sum of past amount due, current charges, payments, and adjustments.
Summary of current charges, which is a sum of different types of service usage charges, other charges and credits, and taxes and surcharges. If a customer has used different types of services, such as GSM and ADSL, this section displays the summary of current charges for GSM and ADSL services separately.
A URL for online payments and a support phone number to resolve customer queries.
Payment slip, which the customer needs to detach from the invoice and returns when making the payment.

Adjustment, Payment, Promotion, and Other Charges and Credits Details

This section of the invoice includes the following details:

Adjustment details: This section displays the adjustments that the customer service representative (CSR) performs on the customer account. The invoice displays the type of adjustment, date on which the adjustment was done, amount adjusted, and the reason for adjustment.
Payment details: This section displays the payment type, date on which payment is made, payment amount, and the reason for the payment. For example, if the customer has made a cash payment of $15, the Amount column displays (15).
Promotion details: This section displays a list of promotions offered by the service provider. It displays promotion-related details, such as promotion name, promotion validity period, and current status of promotion. For more information on promotions, see "Adding Siebel CRM Promotion Names to Invoices".
Other charges and credits details: This section displays information related to dispute, refund, settlement, write-off, and write-off reversal.

Charge Details

For consumer accounts, this section of the invoice displays the usage charge details for a particular phone number. If the user has multiple phone numbers, different sections for each phone number display the charge details corresponding to that number. For an account that has a paying parent bill unit, the invoice displays the total charges for each nonpaying child bill unit.

This section of the invoice also displays package, service, bundle, and charge offer details used by the customer.

Note:

If no device (phone number) is associated with a service, the charge details are displayed under Non Device details section.

Balance Details: Includes the details of noncurrency balances available for a service type. For example, it can display the number of free seconds available for the GSM telephony service type.
Charge Summary: Displays total charges, which is a sum of recurring charges, one-time charge, taxes and surcharges, and total discounts.
Usage Summary: Displays the service usage for different services.

After the summary information section, the invoice displays itemized usage details based on service type. For example, for telephony and SMS services used, the invoice displays two sections for telephony and SMS usage. By default, the invoice displays the rounded-off value of event usage. To display the exact usage duration in the invoice, you can customize the charge offer so that the usage event is populated with the exact net quantity.

Note:

The discount and tax break up details are available in the invoice data generated in XML format. However, the invoice document in PDF does not display these details in the Usage Summary section.

About Localized Invoices

You can create localized invoices in BRM, as follows:

Use UTF8 encoding for hard-coded text strings in XSLT or HTML invoice templates, such as table titles.
Specify the BRM locale when loading your invoice template. See "Loading Invoice Templates".

You can also use DOC1 from Group 1 Software, Inc., to create localized invoices. For information, see the DOC1 documentation.