How to

How water usage gets onto a metered customer's bill

Reads come in from the route, and every metered customer's bill has to charge for the water they used, at the right tiers, without someone opening each bill and adding usage by hand. In BasicBMS the recurring run does that part. On the bill date it finds each metered point's reads for the period, prices them on the point's rate, and prints the usage, with the meter readings, on the bill. Your job is to get the reads in and clear the ones that look wrong.

Steps

1. Get the period's reads in before the bill date. Use Metering → Import Reads for a CSV file from the route, or enter a read on the service point.

2. Open Metering → Read Cycle, set Billing Period:, and screen the cycle. Every read is checked for Rollback, High Usage, Zero Usage, Negative Consumption and No Read against the thresholds in company settings.

3. Open Metering → Read Exceptions and work the flagged reads. For each one, either click the check (Accept the reported consumption as correct) or click edit, correct the read, and click Save & Re-screen. A read that still fails is kept and its reason shown. That's a warning, not a failed save.

4. Before the run, open Billing → Dashboard to preview a metered point's next bill with the usage already on hand.

5. Let the schedule run. Nothing else to click: each metered point's bill picks up its reads by itself.

Which reads go on which bill. Bills are in arrears, so the January 1 bill covers October 1 to December 31. It takes the point's reads that aren't on a bill yet and whose period ends on or before December 31. A read that arrives late goes on the next bill. A read that hasn't been screened is screened first, the same as an import. A read that gets flagged waits on Read Exceptions until someone clears it, then goes on the next bill. Nothing is lost and nothing is billed twice: once a read is on a bill it's marked Billed with that bill.

How the usage is priced and printed. Usage is priced on the rate item's blocks, each block charging only the units inside its range. Each usage line shows the gallons, the price per gallon and the meter span. A 22,000-gallon quarter on a $45 base with 5,000 gallons included, then $0.003 to 15,000 and $0.006 above:

Line	Detail	Amount
Base Service Charge		45.00
Included water	5000 gal @ $0.00/gal · meter 12,340 → 34,340	0.00
Metered Usage (5000–15000 gal)	10000 gal @ $0.003/gal · meter 12,340 → 34,340	30.00
Metered Usage (15000+ gal)	7000 gal @ $0.006/gal · meter 12,340 → 34,340	42.00
Total		117.00

The meter span lets the customer check the arithmetic against their own meter.

What posts behind it

Usage lines are ordinary bill lines, so they post with the bill. The $117.00 bill above:

	Account	Debit	Credit
DR	Accounts Receivable	117.00	—
CR	The rate item's GL Sales account (or GL Defaults Inventory Sales)	—	117.00
	Balanced	117.00	117.00

Importing, screening or accepting a read posts nothing.

When it won’t let you

Stuck on this one? Call (509) 955-0770 and we'll walk through it with you.