Billing Accounts With Next Bill Dates in the Past
- Mahnoor Khan (Deactivated)
- Greg Walsh
Summary
This document describes how to bill accounts that have next bill dates in the past. EngageIP, as of the writing of this article, will not go back in time and bill accounts that had not been caught up previously. Â This is a manual process to catch up these accounts.
EngageIP Billing, when automated, bills for the current day only. Once its done (the current day), it increments the date value to the next date and come the next day, bills only those accounts with next bill dates of that current date. It will not go back and bill packages with dates in the past, hence the necessity in some cases to follow the procedure below to 'catch up' accounts so that they can be included in the automated bill run going forward.
Determining if Packages with old Next Bill Dates Need to be Billed
Go to account services report (reports tab)
Filter by active services, and enabled users and by bill group if you want to specify a particular bill group
Click the header link for 'nextbilldate' so that its sorted asc (smallest first)
To further refine, you can set a date range, ie, set the max date to 'today' to see all packages that are less then today that need to be caught up.
Catching up Users with Old Next Bill Dates
Check that the bill group assigned to the customer is 'Billable' on the admin tab
Note the 'Next Bill Date' on the customers packages that need to be billed and caught up
Click on Bill Run for the owner of those accounts
Set the start date less then today. Example, if today is July 15th, you can set it to July 14th. This tells the system to start the bill run process
Set the 'bill customers between' to a date before earliest 'Next Bill Date' shown on the accounts you need to bill
Set the 'and' to any date after the latest 'Next Bill Date' shown on the accounts you need to bill. Usually you can leave it as the current date so that EngageIP will attempt to catch up any next bill dates that fall between the Last Bill Run date and the Next Bill Run date. (it will not double bill, it will only bill those packages that need to be billed)
Click Save
Ensure that the EngageIP Billing service is started
Review the Event log - you will see records indicating that billing is opening threads, or creating invoices and other general bill run functions
Once the event log shows 'Finished bill run', you can then check the Bill Run History report to confirm that billing has executed
Review the customer accounts that needed to be caught up during this bill run and monitor them to confirm that they have been billed
Note: If billing is automated it will check for customers to be billed each day, however if for some reason it misses a day or a customer was added with a package dated in the past, that package and account will need to be manually billed to be brought up to date so that going forward they will be billed during the automated process. It's best to institute a policy for not back dating packages when adding accounts or to be familiar with and schedule this manual billing process on a regular basis so that accounts are up to date.
