What shipped

Water billing that follows the connection, not the owner

A house on a small water system sells on November 15. The seller owes for six weeks of the quarter; the buyer owes for the other six. In most small offices that means a calculator, a one-off invoice typed by hand, and a sticky note to change the name before the next billing run. Miss the note and the seller gets the buyer's bill.

Reads are the same story. They come in from the route, and someone opens each bill and adds that customer's usage by hand, at the right tier, every quarter.

As of this release, BasicBMS Water does both of those itself.

The bill belongs to the tap

A water system bills connections, not people. People move; the tap at the end of the road stays. So the recurring bill now lives on the service point, the connection, and the service point holds everything a bill needs: who the customer is today, which rate to charge, which invoice layout to use, and when to bill.

On each bill date the run reads those four things fresh and builds the bill. Nothing is copied forward from last quarter. So the changes that used to break a recurring bill are each one edit: change the customer when a house sells, edit the rate when the board votes an increase, record a change-out when a meter is swapped.

Here's how to set it up: How to set up recurring billing on a service point.

A house sale is one panel

On the service point, Final bill asks for two things: the move-out date and who to bill next. It shows the bill before you create it: billed for 10/01/2026 – 11/15/2026 (46 of 92 days), $75.00 on a $150 quarterly rate. One click bills the seller, posts it, and switches the point to the buyer. The buyer's first bill starts the next day and covers the other 46 days. The two halves add up to the full quarter, and nobody did the math.

That works because every bill now carries its service period, printed in the header. Bills are in arrears, so the January 1 bill covers October through December, and each period starts the day after the last one ended. What the service period on a bill means and how to cut a final bill cover the details.

Reads price themselves

On a metered point, the quarterly run finds the reads for the quarter, prices them on the point's rate, and puts the usage on the bill with the meter readings printed: 10000 gal @ $0.003/gal · meter 12,340 → 34,340. The customer can check the arithmetic against their own meter.

Rates are entered the way rate sheets are written: a base charge, any other fixed charges, and usage blocks, each charging only the units inside its range. A 22,000-gallon quarter isn't billed at the top rate. Before you save a rate, type in a usage number and the app shows the bill it would produce. Every past rate stays in the price history. How to set up a water rate.

Reads are screened before they bill: rollbacks, spikes, zeros and negative usage wait on Read Exceptions for a person to look at. A read that never came in doesn't hold up the bill. The bill goes out with its base charge, the miss is flagged, and the usage catches up on the next bill. How usage gets onto the bill and what happens when a read is missing.

The honest part

There are no estimated bills. A missing read means a base-charge-only bill, and the usage lands on the next one. Rate changes apply the moment they're saved; there's no effective date, so enter an increase on the day it starts. Read import is CSV only for now.

What it costs

BasicBMS Water is $3 per connection per month, with a $100 monthly minimum. Every feature and every user is included: billing, payments, work orders, scheduling and the general ledger.

Implementation is a one-time fee equal to ten months of your subscription. We load your accounts and meters, so you don't start on a blank screen.