This section describes the process for generating and managing Tenant Bills, including their issue. You can be confident that any billing anomalies or issues will be captured ahead of bills being issued to your tenants. Sigma will automatically validate new bills based on the 'validators' that have been setup, checking against historical bills and data completeness to ensure the variability is within a suitable limit. Bills will be highlighted in red or amber based on the severity of the validation errors.

The validation checks are configurable as per your business processes to make sure you can prioritise and spend the time investigating valid issues. This will save you time due to fewer queried bills, improving customer service and ensuring you are paid on time. The validation performed can be customised to suit your needs to change the tolerances applied across the portfolio.

You can use the fully audited out-the-box simple approve and issue capability ensure you are happy with the bills ahead of them being issued to your Tenants; seeing who issued the bills and when., along with a full breakdown of all the details.

It is also possible to perform test and accrual billing runs that are used to determine what the outcome of a bill run, without actually creating bills. This is useful for:

• accruing expected revenue ahead of actually performing a bill run using the latest consumption information; or
• determining the impact of re-issuing a bill based on updated data.

Overview

The management of Tenant bills is achieved by using three activities in Sigma:

• Tenant Bill Run initiation
• Tenant Bill Run Management
• Tenant Approve and Issue Bills

See below a diagram to explain the process:

Billing Periods

• Multiple bills may be created for each Billing Period specified
• Where there is a change of Supply Point Contract Container within the Billing Period, more than one Bill will be created
• For example there may be a Change of Tenancy, a Change of Contract (and therefore Tariff) or a new Meter installed
• A Change in Cost Definition Entries will not split a Bill
• At each stage of the Tariff Engine, checks are performed on the existence and validity of the Configuration Data, and Consumption Data
• Bill Messages may be raised if any issues with data are identified

The issuing of tenant bills is the process which actually produces the tax point document - i.e. the official statement of charges that has been shared with the Customer.

Once a Bill has been issued it cannot be Cancelled, it can only be Withdrawn so that a new bill (rebill) can be created if needed.

Issued Bills can either be created PDF for onward emailing or posting to the Tenant, or as a schedule of charges in spreadsheet format for cases where only advice of calculated charges is required (using the reporting tools). Where a physical invoice document is not required, the Accounts Integration capability can be used to create a file that can be sent to an accounting system (e.g. Sage, Agresso, Oracle, SAP).

This page will help you understand the process of creating Tenant Bills, working through any queries and then Approve and Issue the Bills.

The following pages will help you understand the process:

• Understanding the Tenant Bill Run Initiation Activity

• Performing a Billing Run
  • Bill Run Types
  • Dealing with Bill Messages 
    • Bill Run Status Messages explained
      • Configuring the Bill Run Messages
  • Performing an Ad-Hoc Billing Run

• Understanding the Approve and Issue Bills Activity
  • Columns in the Approve and Issue Bills Activity

• Reviewing the Bills
  • Dealing with Failed Validation
  • Reviewing the Metering Data
  • Understand the Tenant Bill
  • Editing and Creating Queries
  • Recalculating Bill Charges

• Viewing the Bills, Charges, Account etc
  • Bill Statuses

• Re-running the Billing Group

• Cancelling, Withdrawing and Rebilling

• Issuing Tenant Bills

• Approving and Issuing the Bills