Billing overview

A billing account is the central record that stores and processes billing information for an individual customer. The account identifies the customer who is financially responsible for paying bills, and stores the customer's complete billing, payment and delinquency history.

To bill accounts, you must first define one or more bill types. Each bill type includes information such as formulas for calculating due and delinquency dates, payment application rules, and the messages and inserts that are included with bills. Most importantly, each bill type includes one or more line items representing the charges that are included in a bill.

Line items are defined independently from bill types and can be reused on different bill types. Various predefined line item types define the different charges and credits that can be included on a bill, such as adjustments, deposits, and refunds.

Line items also indicate which rate table is used to calculate the line item charge amount. Rate tables define a set of rules for calculating a charge that can be as simple or as complex as required.

The process of generating bills is called a bill run. A bill run is a batch process that can be run manually, or scheduled to run after hours to reduce the load on the agency's servers. Infor Public Sector creates a bill record for each account that matches the criteria for the bill run, and then evaluates, calculates and adds the relevant line items for each account. After they are calculated, bills can either be printed and mailed, or delivered through email.

You add payments to payment batches as you receive them from customers, and then you can either post these batches manually or schedule a Post Payments Run task in the Batch Manager. Like bill generation, payment posting is a batch process.

Finally, Infor Public Sector provides a range of options for handling unpaid bills and delinquent accounts, from adding penalties to sending accounts to collections.

Again, batch processes are used to manage penalties and delinquencies. Penalty runs and collections runs are both batch processes, and a delinquency run is a configurable, milestone-based batch process in which Infor Public Sector takes the appropriate action for each account depending on its level of delinquency. For example, a delinquency run might generate reminder notices for accounts that just became delinquent, and generate one-off penalties for accounts that have been delinquent for more than a month.