1 1.3.2 Creati n g Purchase Invoice. On 2-4-09, received a purchase bill from Reliable Computers for the supply booked. Create Purchase Invoice. Go to Gateway of T ally Accounting V ouchers F9: Purchase. Press F2 and change the date to 2-4-2009. Enter the Supplier Invoice No.
- Bill 2 5 4 – Invoicing Made Painless And Fundamentals 3rd Edition
- Bill 2 5 4 – Invoicing Made Painless And Fundamentals 2nd Edition
- Bill at Sight – Due date is the date on which a bill is presented for the payment. Bill after Sight –Here, the due date is the date of acceptance plus terms of the bill. For example, if the bill is drawn on 1st March and it is accepted on 5th March. In that case, if the maturity of the bill is 1 month after sight.
- After confirming order shipment, you need to print an invoice to bill the customer for the goods or services. To print invoices, sales order detail lines must contain the appropriate next status code, such as 580 (print invoice). When you print invoices, the system advances the order to the next step according to the order activity rules.
Manage and Send Invoices with Bill.com to Get Paid Faster
Bill.com automates your accounts receivable process so you can get paid faster. Once you've entered the invoice information for your customer, Bill.com will send out an electronic invoice to the recipient through email. The e-invoice includes any additional contracts, paperwork, and documentation you have attached via Bill.com to ensure your customers have all the information at their fingertips.
If your customer prefers you send invoices by mail, Bill.com will mail those for you as well with all your supporting documentation included.
Learn more about customer invoices and the Bill.com Account Receivable product.
Accounting Software Integration
One of the best features about Bill.com is the seamless integration with leading accounting software: QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Intacct. Bill.com syncs with your accounting software, and changes will made in either Bill.com or your accounting software will automatically be reflected in the other system. This saves time by avoiding double entry and eliminates potential entry errors associated with managing dual systems.
Recurring Invoices and Payments
If you have recurring transactions, you can set up Bill.com to invoice customers automatically on a preset schedule. You can set up the recurring invoice once and forget it.
Better yet, you can set your customers for recurring direct debit from their bank account as well. This ensures you get paid on time, every time. Transactions are done through ACH, which means you will be paid much faster than standard paper-based checks you receive in the mail.
Automatic Reminders and Overdue Notices
When you create invoices through Bill.com, you can set up automatic reminders and overdue notices that will send out to your customers when an invoice is approaching its due date or overdue. No more micromanaging each invoice to ensure it's been paid. Bill.com will show you which invoice has been paid at a glance, and send out the appropriate reminders on their scheduled date on your behalf.
Payment Options
Bill.com lets you get paid through whatever method is most convenient for your customers: domestic ACH, international wires in USD or local currency, virtual card, or check. Any way they choose, the payment goes directly into your bank account, eliminating any need to run to the bank to deposit checks.
Customers pay invoices in a secure payment gateway, branded with your logo. They can access historical invoices and documentation, with a messaging tool built within the customer portal so client and vendors can exchange notes.
- Telecom Billing Tutorial
- Advanced Telecom Billing Topics
- Useful Telecom Billing Resources
- Selected Reading
Billing is the aggregation of all non-recurring, periodic, and chargeable events on an account-by-account basis. It is also the calculation of all outstanding charges and available discounts and bonuses.
The output from billing process is a stream of tagged bill data that can be used to create a bill on paper, disk, or any other media. Billing Engine, which is part of the Billing System, creates invoices.
Bill Process
The following diagram shows the basic diagram of the Billing Engine and associated functions −
The Billing Engine picks up an account to generate a bill and the following associated information to generate invoice data −
All the rated CDRs for the customer within the month of invoice.
All types of charges (initiation, installation, periodic, suspension, termination, etc.,) applicable for the customer's products and services.
If there is any refund or any other charges applicable.
Total outstanding from previous bills.
Total payments made by the customer in the given month.
Total adjustment passed in favor of the customer or against the customer.
Total discount given to the customer.
Total taxes applicable on customer's usage and rental charges.
Billing configuration parameter required to run the Billing Engine; for example, payment due date, etc.
The above-mentioned information is just an indicative and may vary from billing system to billing system and operator to operator.
Billing Engine produces raw data having all the information required to generate a final bill and this raw data can be used to generate a final invoice to be sent to the end customer.
Bill Cycles
When a customer is added into the Billing System, system assigns the customer a predefined Bill Cycle. A bill cycle is a date on which Billing Engine runs and produces bills for a set of customers.
If there are many customers, then they are divided into different billing cycles. For example, a group of customers can have billing data as 1st of every month; another can have the billing date on 15th of every month.
If a customer is assigned to run a bill on 1st of the month, this would be called customer's nominal bill date. But because of various reasons, many times bill run becomes delayed and actual bill gets generated on a later date, this would be called actual bill date.
Bill Types
There could be various types of bills available for a user. Few of them may not be supported by some Billing Systems.
| Sr.No. | Bill Type & Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Initiation bill Normally, only requested as the first bill on an account. Includes product charges and adjustments, but no events. |
| 2 | Periodic bill Produced at regular intervals. Includes all periodic charges, events, and adjustments. |
| 3 | Interim bill An extra bill that contains charges due to events processed for the account since the last bill. Includes all events and adjustments, but no periodic charges. |
| 4 | Suspension bill Sent when an account has been suspended. Includes all periodic charges, events, and adjustments. |
| 5 | Final bill Sent when an account has been terminated to bill all outstanding charges that are due. Includes all periodic charges, events, and adjustments, along with any refunds; for example, the return of a deposit. |
| 6 | Post-final bill Sent when a terminated account has receivables outstanding after the production of a final bill. Includes any post-termination events and adjustments, but no periodic charges. |
| 7 | Credit note An extra bill that contains all adjustments in the customer's favor generated since the last bill. |
| 8 | Summary Statements A summary statement can be produced for a customer-driven billing hierarchy. It can summarize all the bills produced by all accounts associated with the respective customer. Optionally, they can also concatenate all the bills into a single statement. |
Bills are produced either automatically or on request from a customer.
Billing Modes
A Billing System can generate bills in two modes, for example −
Test (what if?) billing mode − This mode if used to produce formatted test bills whilst leaving the database unchanged. These bills are useful to make sure that system is working fine and test after making changes to bill templates or tariffs.
When running the Billing Engine in test mode, commits are not made to the database. So there would not be any impact on customer's profile even after running test billing many number of times.
Test bills are usually run for a sample set of customers. If you are satisfied with the test bills, then you can proceed for production bills.
Production (live) billing mode − This mode is used to produce normal production bills. Most of the time, this is the default mode for the Billing Engine.
Once a production bill is generated, Billing Engine updates customer's profile in the database with the total outstanding balance to be paid by the customer, and next bill date, etc.
Billing Engine assigns different invoice numbers to all the production bills which help in keeping track of different payments made against the invoice.
Bill Suppression
There may be a situation when it is not worth to generate a bill and better to suppress the bill. Following are such type of situations −
Suppressing bills for accounts with zero (zero activity bills) or very little value (small bills).
A particular type of bill can also be suppressed if multiple bill types are requested/scheduled at the same time and therefore preventing unnecessary bills from being sent to the customer.
A small bill is a bill that falls between the ranges defined by the minimum positive bill amount and the maximum negative bill amount, exceptional bill conditions. Small valued bills are produced and then removed from the billing process, so that they are not sent out to customers.
Exceptional Bills
Examples of possible exceptional bills are unusually high bills or bills, which exceed the account's credit limit by a set multiplier. The Billing Engine performs some basic checks on the bill data that it produces. These involve testing the total being billed to ensure that the following conditions are met −
Bill 2 5 4 – Invoicing Made Painless And Fundamentals 3rd Edition
The bill total is greater than the minimum negative bill amount.
The bill total is less than the maximum positive bill amount.
The bill total is less than account's credit limit multiplied by the credit limit multiplier.
All the above conditions vary from billing system to billing system and operator to operator and they are called exceptional bills conditions.
Bill Itemization
By default, all the invoices provide a detailed summary of product and service charges along with usage charges. But it does not provide the details on all the calls made by the customer.
An itemized bill means giving complete details of all the calls made by the customer. This needs more number of papers to be printed. Recent trend is to send itemized bill through electronic e-mail and summary statement is sent using a physical copy of the bill.
Bill Formatting
There are Billing Systems, which provide Billing Formatting utilities, which can be used to generate final formatted bills.
Bill formatters take the output data produced by the Billing Engine and usually generate either Post Script file or a PDF file, which can be used by the Bill Printing Company.
If Billing System is not capable enough to generate formatted bills, then system generates a set of tagged files along with billing information and any external Bill Formatter can use that tagged information to generate a well-formatted invoice.
No matter, if Billing System generates formatted invoice or we use an external tool to generate these formatted invoice using raw data generated by the billing engine, finally these invoices are sent to the bill printing company, who takes care of generating final copy of generating invoice. We will discuss it in detail in the subsequent chapter 'Invoice Generation.'
What is Next?
Next chapter would explain discount process, which is actually a part of rating and billing process, but we kept it as a separate section because of the various that items need more explanation.
Bill 2 5 4 – Invoicing Made Painless And Fundamentals 2nd Edition
We will discuss different types of discount hierarchies and which can be given at the time of rating and billing.
