- When you select contracts for individual billing, you can specify the processing level.
- If the Display Bill indicator is set, the contract is billed and then invoiced, the bill is then printed and finally displayed on the screen.
- If the Invoicing indicator is set, the contract is billed and invoiced. However, the bill is not printed or displayed.
- In individual processing, you can also capture meter reading results.
- You can also simulate individual bills. In the same way as individual billing, you can select different processing levels. However, you can simulate bills per individual document or contract account. The individual document invoice simulation does not run a mandatory/optional check.
The contract account simulation runs the mandatory/optional check in the same way as actual invoicing.
- There are two billing alternatives: individual and mass processing.
- In individual processing, you can bill a contract account, a contract, or an installation.
- With mass processing, you can start mass runs in the night batch job to prevent an unnecessary load to the system. This is used for billing large numbers of contracts.
- The mass overall check ensures that the selected contracts are billable.
- Mass processing enables you to limit the runtime by entering the check runtime indicator and the date and time fields.
- You can also use parallel processing in mass processing. This means that several billing processes are run in parallel.
- The system differentiates between billing line items relevant to posting and information lines. Billing line items relevant to posting contain information for the posting, such as net amount. Information line items contain additional information that is absolutely necessary for bill printout, for example, device number, meter reading from/to.
- Information lines should be active only where needed to reduce unnecessary billing document line items. They are helpful during testing phases and can be used to ensure the billing is operating correctly.
- Tax is not calculated until invoicing.
- The document line items control and analyze the billing rule.
- Billing document line items are primarily required for bill printing, where the system may need to know which line item it is dealing with, for example in the billing form. For example, different information needs to be printed for energy price line items than for basic charge line items.
- Line item types are stored in the rate in the rate steps and are automatically proposed by the system.
- If necessary, additional document line item types can be defined in the customer namespace and be allocated to a variant program or rate.
The billing document can be displayed on the screen using the billing document display. This transaction is used for example, when the billing is outsorted and the clerk has to check the billing line items.