Billing Services
Whether you’re serving residential and small commercial customers at a flat monthly rate or large industrials with hourly pricing, REBO can meet your billing needs. While billing customers is a fundamentally simple process, getting it right requires having accurate and timely usage information matched to each customer’s price point, and producing an invoice as soon as that data is available.
REBO’s billing system has the following capabilities:
- Receive pricing files from the your pricing system,
- Receive and process utility delivery charges in service areas where the retailer also bills for delivery charges
- Produce daily billing files in the specified format for monthly pricing and daily or hourly pricing,
- Produce revenue and receivable aging reports
- Apply applicable state sale or gross receipts taxes.
The REBO billing system creates a customer’s invoice once per billing cycle based on usage data provided by the customer’s utility/ISO and your billing determinants. Because REBO’s billing system stores pricing data by customer, you have ultimate flexibility in developing and pricing that meets your and your customer’s needs.
Fixed-price customers billing determinants are limited to the level of usage detail provided in the 867 file. For example, if the customer’s usage is reported as total kWh for the billing cycle, the customer can only be invoiced on total kWh. For time-of-day rate customers, that customer can be billed by the utility defined time-of-day blocks as long as usage for those blocks is reported in the utility provided usage data.
Other billing options are available using billing determinants that you define, but will generally require REBO processing of the raw usage data files.
Customer bills include state sales or gross receipts tax as appropriate. Additional local taxes may be added if a systematic method of associating customers with the appropriate local taxes can be defined.
Billing files are available within 24 hours of receipt of usage data for fixed price customers and within 24 hours of receipt of usage data and your market price data for market priced customers. If the market price is based on ISO LMPs, REBO can source the LMP data and you only need to identify the delivery point and appropriate adders on multipliers to the ISO’s LMP.
If a customer’s usage data is not received in a timely manner or the data received does not conform to our data cleaning rules, an estimated bill is produced based on the customer’s forecasted usage. For example, if usage data is not received within 5 days of the end of a customer’s billing cycle, an estimated bill is generated. An adjustment will be made to the customer’s bill in the bill following receipt of the actual usage data. Billing adjustments will be produced as needed and flagged as such in the billing file.
Billing files can be either csv files containing client-defined fields for input into your accounting system, or as pdf images of customer bills. Pdf images will be in a form that meets your specifications.
Billing Reconciliation and Aging
REBO offers a billing reconciliation service based on payment files received from your bank. It is only available to clients for whom REBO is providing billing services.
This service includes:
- Receive a payment file from your bank,
- The file must contain at least enough information to identify each customer billed. At a minimum, that would be customer name and service address. Account numbers and meter numbers for each address are desirable.
- Extract, transform, and load the payment files,
- Produce the following daily reports by customer:
- Expected daily payment receipts with payment received and outstanding balance. For example, if you allows 15 days for invoice payment, and the bank requires 2 days for processing payments, then the report would be produced 18 days after the invoice, one day after receipt of the bank file.
- Accounts receivable aging report in group reports of <30 days, 30-60 days, 60-90 days and >90 days.