The Book Bag : Product and Billing Items

Tips from a Troubleshooter: Using Billing Cycles to Go Back to the Future

Sean Long — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:25:00 GMT

Once upon a time, end of year procedures involved copying your products and billing items. The Copy utility was great, it had a lot of cool features, and it would make your life a lot easier if it was correctly used. Think of it as the DeLorean of processes. It has stainless steel body work, beautiful gull-wing doors, and an attitude to match!

Like the DeLorean, the Copy utility had problems getting anywhere efficiently, and sometimes you had to pop the hood and take a good hard look at the whatsit. So we created a new way to handle your end of year procedures: The Billing Cycle.

The Billing Cycle is the Back to the Future version of the Copy utility. You load up the Mr. Fusion, hit 88 miles an hour, and you're done!

Billing Cycles are basically a way to keep track of your dates. They define a cycle of billing in the database. This could be your fiscal year or any other period of time you need to count as a cycle (one customer I spoke to copies billing items each semester).

For example, to set up your fiscal year as a billing cycle, go to Configuration, Billing Cycles, and set it up so that 2009-2010 has a start date of 07/01/2009 and an end date of 06/30/2010.

The beauty of the Billing Cycle is that you can associate 3 things with it:

Application Restrictions
Products and Billing Items
Bill Codes

This way, when you copy your Billing Cycle from 2009-2010 to 2011-2012, you copy all of those items. Thus, you've gone Back to go to the Future!

The only additional work left is adjusting fee amounts and repairing the Flux Capacitor.

Have a creative way you've used Billing Cycles? I'd love to hear it! Leave a comment below!

Student Billing State-of-Mind: Where's My Billing Item?

Jennifer Maroney — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:11:00 GMT

Here's the scenario: You have a list of charges or financial aid to enter. You're a pro at this process so you jump right in, but the Item/Description drop-down is blank or does not show the billing item. What do you do now? Well, there are many reasons why a billing item or fee may not be available including:

The billing item or fee is not valid for the transaction date. Only billing items set to be used during the transaction date are included in the drop-down list.
The billing item is marked as inactive.
The billing item type is different than the transaction type.

Ok, so now you know why the items can go missing, what do you? Follow these steps which take you through fixing the most common causes of missing items.

In Configuration, click Products and Billing Items.
Open the billing item that was not included in the drop-down list.
Verify the transaction date is within the Item can only be used from date range fields. If the date does not fall within the date range, create a new fee for the appropriate date range.
Verify the billing item's status is Active.
If adding a Fee Schedule and the fee was created as a manual fee, re-enter the fee in Configuration as an Automatic Item.

Talk to you soon!

Student Billing State-of-Mind: Tally Your Charges

Jennifer Maroney — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:00:00 GMT

If you have ever wondered how much revenue you receive based on product, this is the post for you. You can filter the Transaction List to subtotal and summarize for each product and billing item. Here's how:

Create a new Transaction List.
On the General tab, select the appropriate dates.
In the Include these transaction types box, unmark all checkboxes except Charges and Invoices.
Select the Format tab and highlight Detail.
Mark the Print summary for products and billing items checkbox.
Highlight Sort/Break and select Billing item under Sort by.
Click Preview.

Talk to you soon!