Overview
This article explains the Billing Start Date, one of the primary mechanisms the system uses to help bill a customer correctly.
For more on Plans and Subscriptions, go to this page.
For info on access fees, go to this page.
Use Cases
During onboarding, accounts and services are brought into the system with historical start dates that could go back years. It's common to require the start date of a service subscription to be accurate, but we don't necessarily want to back-bill the end user. When backdating a service, the system would automatically create all the subscription periods back to the start date on the assumption back-billing was necessary. This created lots of unnecessary data (access fees, periods, etc) that had to be cleaned up manually.
There are also use cases where a wholesale service provider may wish to charge the retail service provider, but the retail provider may not want to pass the charges onto the end user. For example, an NBN service may be provisioned, but only when the end-user receives the modem does the end-user get charged. The retail service provider is responsible immediately.
These scenarios have led Emersion to introduce the Billing Start Date. This date sits at the service subscription level.
The billing start date is a simple concept. The system will continue to generate the periods, but will not process the period and gfenerate access fees for any periods until the billing start date is reached.
Setting the Billing Start Date
The Billing Start Date can be configured against the package or service subscription. Where the user configures it (package or service ) will depend on how the package and service plans themselves have been configured.
- If Service Plan access fees are configured (which is the most common configuration), users should configure the service subscription billing start date.
- If Package Plan access fees are used (to override access fees for bundles, etc), users should configure the package subscription billing start date.
If billing start date is against the service subscription, any attached billing objects will also follow the same billing start date.
If you set a billing start date against a package subscription, this will only apply to access fees generated at the package subscription level. This cannot apply to the service subscription
Billing Start Date Types
The billing start date functionality offers the following configuration options:
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
Process full period | If the system tries to process an advanced period where the billing start date falls in between the period start and end dates, the system will generate an access fee to go from the billing start date to the period end. This fee will be prorated if necessary. An access fee is not generated at all if both the period start and period end are in the past. This applies only to access fees that are billed in advance. |
Process arrears only | The system will only generate an access fee if the period start date is after the billing start date. Unlike the Process Full Period setting, the system will not attempt to prorate the access fee. This applies only to access fees that are billed in advance. |
Delay advance only | The system will only attempt to generate an access fee if the period end date is after the billing start date. This applies only to access fees that are billed in arrears. |