Billing Exceptions Resolution

This document is a guide to help the Billing department in the exceptions resolution. It is important that the personnel working on the exceptions have adequate knowledge of what an exception is, in order to make correct decisions in their resolution.

Here it is explain the general procedure to solve exceptions:

- Exceptions Detected in CMS system
- Understand the type of exception and why it has been detected e.g. BILLING PERIOD INSUFFICIENT implies that the supply has been read before the completion of a billing period.
- Open The Exception
- Check the general history of the supply, to find out the accurate cause of the exception:
* The consumption history
* Meter information
* Bills etc
- Solve the exception in such a way that you produce a correct bill and prevent other inconsistencies from occurring in the future

What is a billing exception?

Billing exceptions are any abnormal situations for a supply detected during the billing process. These abnormal situations may cause improper billing of the supply or no billing at all. Thus, it becomes necessary to analyse and solve these inconsistencies before billing (with actual reading data or estimates) is performed

What is the consequence of the abnormal situation?

Abnormal situations may cause improper billing of a supply

What does the billing team do with the exception?

They have to analyse and solve the exceptions before billing it once and for all.

N.B: It more important to have quality resolution of exception, rather than the number of exceptions solved in a day.

1. Always review contracted services, service point usage history, meters installed and removed and its readings, service orders generated and previous exceptions in the billing period for the service point when analysing an exception.

2. In every case when the solution is not clear (particularly meter readings and parameters), a service order must be generated, which must be solved in a maximum of five days.

3. If the supply has more than one pending anomaly the user must resolve them all, beginning with the oldest. For correct billing it is mandatory that we solve the oldest anomaly and then wait until this is billed (processed), which has to be within two days, then resolve the next. This way the customers (particularly domestic ones) are not overcharged and will get a bill for every month.

4. Consider that besides the resolution of the exception, the problem that caused the exception must be fixed, so that in future the service point could be billed correctly. This could mean the generation of additional service orders and/or communication with other users in charge of other areas of the system.

5. Never mark an exception to be ignored if the data that caused it was not corrected.

6. Be careful when resolving an exception of a service point without billing it, this will cause all its contracted services not to be billed.

N.B:

During the resolution of exceptions, the billing personnel may find an exception with no meter number and no previous reading and this will be labeled as "No meter data" [when the exception is double clicked and the 'meter' tab is selected]. This will occur where the exception type is 'Excessive consecutive estimates', 'Excessive annual estimates', and 'Missing usage'.

This is not an exception. This could be as a result of the service or the service point being over estimated (i.e. beyond the set parameters for each type of exception) therefore having no meter data or due data inconsistency.

The most appropriate way of resolving such exceptions is to obtain an actual reading and find out what the actual status on the field is (the actual meter number, type of meter etc. The procedure is as follows:
i. Generate a service order through the exceptions window
ii. When the service order is returned, the reading should be entered in the service order or any other corrective actions carried out e.g. indicate the correct meter type and then resolve the service order.
iii. Bill the service/ service point. The reading entered in the service order is the reading that will be used for billing.
iv. Resolve the exception

Such exceptions can be resolved by estimation, though this is a less preferable way of resolving them.