Bill Generation - Rental and billing

The billing console for one billing month. It walks you through the four steps that turn tenancies and meter readings into this period's bills, and shows what each run actually did.

When to use it

At month end, to bill your rental customers: all of them, or a named few.

Before you start

Tenancies must exist, each with its service lines, rates and policies.
Meter readings for the month must be entered for any metered service.
You need rights on this screen. Running it raises real invoices, so that right usually belongs to a billing supervisor, not to everyone who can look at the numbers.

Where to find it

Entry > Bill Generation.

The fields on this screen

How it works

Choose the period. Pick the Year and Month (Nepali months). Leave Customers empty to bill the whole period, which is the normal month-end action, or pick named customers. The picker offers only customers who hold an active charge for that month.
Step 1, Charge / rate calculation. Generate charges re-prices every tenancy service into dated rate slices that cover the period. This step does not run on a schedule, so run it by hand each period. The screen tells you when it is not scheduled.
Step 2, Meter readings. Enter readings takes you to the meter reading screen for the month.
Step 3, Bill generation. Preview shows a grid of customers against revenue heads. A customer who would be billed nothing shows as a zero row with the reason on it. Generate bills stays blocked until step 1 is complete. Each bill is issued as a Sales Invoice and taken through its approval to posted, so it reaches the customer's account and your income the same way a typed invoice would.
Step 4, Print / delivery. Print all becomes available once the bills exist.

Below the steps, History lists the runs for the period. Open a run to see the outcome for each customer, including anyone who was skipped and why.

You cannot add, edit or delete records on this screen. It reads the period and runs the two passes.

Tips and common mistakes

If you bill a month whose charges were never generated, customers are under-billed without any warning. The run finds no active charge, skips the customer and still reports success. That is why step 3 refuses to run until step 1 is done.
A metered service with no reading for the month is skipped, not estimated. Read the preview before you generate.
Metered services bill one month in arrears, so this month's bill carries last month's units.
Running a period again does not bill it twice. A customer who already has a bill for the period is left alone.
If the period on screen is not the one you meant, change Year and Month before you look at the step states. They describe the period shown.

Tenancy, Service, Increment Policy and Meter Reading (what the run reads)
Billing Run History (the full record of a run)
Sales Invoice (what a bill actually is)