Overview
This article is for clients who are:
- onboarding with Emersion
- intend to perform a comparison bill run prior to executing their first bill run from the Emersion platform.
The benefits of performing a comparison bill run are numerous. But here are the highlights:
- proving your service plan configuration is accurate
- proving your package plan billing rules are accurate
- demonstrating all pricing within Products, Product Rate Cards and Rate Cards is accurate,
- ascertaining if an invoice generated from Emersion would match a previous customer invoice that has been generated and sent already from another system or process.
- prevent incorrect invoices from being generated and having to be adjusted
- prevent incorrect invoices reaching customers.
Prerequisites
In order to perform a comparison bill run, it is essential to migrate data from the month prior to the date of your first intended bill run in Emersion.
This means you will have to backdate the start dates of the following:
- customer account
- subscriptions for service(s)
- billing object's saleable from dates (package plans, service plans, etc)
- Date Effective date on all rate card and product rate cards
- Effective From date of the product rate cards and rate cards they are linked to service plans.
- Product price points.
You will also need to ensure that any product purchases made during the comparison month are migrated.
Comparison Bill Run Use Case
Comparing the "March Bill Run"
A business plans to execute their first bill run from the Emersion platform in early April.
This is known as the April Bill Run.
The April Bill Run is defined as:
the invoice that will be sent to the customer at the start of April covering:
- any advanced access fees for April (for plans that invoice access fees in advance)
- any in arrears access fees for March (for plans that invoice access fees in arrears)
- any usage incurred in March (usage is always billed in arrears)
But before they send out any invoices to clients, the business wants to ensure that all the plans, pricing and billing rules configured in Emersion is accurate. The business wants to compare the data from the bill run they performed in March against what Emersion would have invoiced had the bill run been done from Emersion. After speaking with their onboarding project manager about this, and deciding the level of comparison they needed, the business understood that they need to generate two months worth of billing data. March data to compare against, and April, the first production bill run. They know they must:
- backdate all customer accounts to March 01. This will tell the system to generate the March invoice period.
- backdate all service subscriptions data to March 01. This will tell the system to generate a subscription period for March covering 01 - 31 March and another from 01- 30 April.
They will need these periods in the system so that the generated charges can fall into the correct period.
Start dates cannot be changed once set.
If a mistake is made, cancel the account or service, and enter it again from scratch.
If you make a mistake when activating a service (the process that sets the service start date), check for any charges that were created as a result of cancelling the service and deleting them. All charges that are yet to be allocated to an invoice are found under:
- Customer > Pending Cardlines
- Finance > Accounts Receivable > Pending Cardlines
Comparison Levels
There are three (3) levels of comparison that are available to choose from, each requiring a different level of detail to compare.
Level 1 Comparison
This is the simplest comparison to perform and involves comparing each account with their invoice total in the previous system (what was sent to the customer) with the invoice total that was generated in Emersion.
Level 2 Comparison
This comparison is more detailed than level 1, but involves performing an account-level comparison. But instead of comparing the total value of the invoice, it is possible to compare each individual card lines on the invoice.
A "card line" is the Emersion term to mean a single line item for the invoice.
Level 3 Comparison
This is a service-level comparison rather than an account level comparison and is the most detailed comparison available.
This involves pulling a list of all active services at the time the invoices were generated out of the previous billing system and comparing against the data in Emersion.
Speak to your Onboarding Project Manager about performing a comparison bill run in Emersion. They will run you through what Emersion reports you can use to perform the level of comparison you require.