New Billing - Beta – Lyconic

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Patrol work, billable alarms, and holiday tours can now be audited in Inteliguide and exported for billing purposes. New Billing is in Beta status as we add other Billing Sources, to include Dedicated Work Orders and Ad-Hoc Shifts (Shifts not generated by or governed by Work Order billing terms).

We worked to ensure that the most common ways of billing and invoicing clients are covered, and our goal from the beginning has been to increase the visibility of all the billable work being generated on a daily basis in all the markets using Inteliguide. To that end, we've built a system that combines and produces a lot of information specifically formatted for detailed exports.

Note: Admins and Accounting Users can access New Billing by clicking on the Reports menu drop down.

Gotchas! (things to watch out for)

Email Billing Notices (Reminders) ARE NOT active yet. We put the interface in Billing Settings to prepare for when we release that feature soon.
For those of you that haven't set Weekly and Bi-Weekly Period Start Dates, you'll be redirected to Billing Settings if you attempt to access New Billing through the REPORTS tab in Inteliguide. This won't be a problem for Admin users, because they'll be redirected to Manage -> Settings -> Billing, and will be asked to set those values. But Accounting users will be redirected to the home page until those values have been set by an Admin.
Flat Rate contracts are not yet being prorated if they start or end in the middle of a period. We'll be releasing that functionality soon.
Any contract that is billed before the last day of the period, so either Cash or Mid-Cycle (last day billing is called 'Accrual') won't be accounting for any Billable Alarms or Holiday Tours that might be completed after the "Bill On" date. You may consider "arrears" billing for things like Holiday Tours and Billable Alarms for accounts that are billed on a Cash or Mid-Cycle basis.

How Things Work

Patrol Work Orders, Dedicated Work Orders, and Locations all now have many corresponding Billing Attributes that will determine how Tours and Shifts associated with them are to be billed. It's important to maintain those values and properly set them up as you enter Accounts and Work Orders into Inteliguide.

Additionally, it's important to understand that New Billing covers Patrol Work Orders only for the time being. The Billing Attributes found in the Step 3: Contract section of the Patrol Work Order Form for each Patrol Work Order, and the patrol work conducted by officers, will determine the output of the New Billing.

We plan on adding Dedicated Work Orders, and Ad-Hoc Shifts as additional Billing Sources very soon!

Note: Ad-Hoc Shifts are Shifts NOT generated or governed by Dedicated Work Orders, Legacy Billing essentially covers this billing source currently.

The New Billing Report was designed to be opened by Excel or eventually imported into some other software for manipulation (like SAGE 100, for example). That's why we focused heavily on detailed output for export. We plan on adding some summary and totals functionality similar to what you see in Payroll down the road.
All results come down to the Billing Method. Each report will vary depending on if you have selected to generate results for Actual Work, Contracted Work, or Flat Rate. The results generated will ONLY come from Patrol Work Orders that are set to your selected Billing Method.
All results will show up in the period that they STARTED in. For Patrol Work Orders, that will be the Start Date for the Work Order. For Tour Schedules, that will be the Date/Time of the Tour Set. For Tours, Billable Alarms, and Holiday Tours, that will be the Date/Time the officer arrived on location to begin work.
Contracted and Flat Rate results will include separate "Line Items" for Billable Alarms and Holiday Tours. These are added per-page to the full Contracted and Flat Rate results.
Holiday Rates will only apply to a Billable Alarm that was started on a holiday IF the Holiday Rate is greater than the Billable Alarm Rate. Otherwise, the report will feature the Billable Alarm Rate.
We order the reports by the Patrol Work Order or Tour Schedule Name first, and then by the date/time the Patrol Work Order, Tour Schedule, or Tour started (depending on the output).
We return Actual Work results in pages of 50, but Contracted Work and Flat Rate in pages of 25. The Contracted and Flat Rate results are smaller in page-size because of the potential for a large amount of Line Items resulting from any given page of results.

Filters & Toggle

Billing is complicated, especially considering all the various ways that clients would like to be billed. So we've tried to make things as simple and discoverable as possible in the New Billing Report, but following is an analysis of the Filters and the Export Toggle.

Filter By

Source

All Patrol Work Orders

Individual Patrol Work Orders

Method
- Flat Rate (Patrol Work Orders billed regardless of what's scheduled or what gets done)
- Contracted (Billed off of Tour Schedules that are generated by Patrol Work Orders)
- Actual Work (Tours that actually were conducted until Completed Status)
Cycle
- All Cycles
- Weekly
- Bi-Weekly (every two weeks)
- Semi-Monthly (1st-15th, 16th-EOM [EOM stands for 'end of month'])
- Monthly
- Custom
Period
- Dynamically generated Period selection based off the selected Billing Cycle
Schedule (Bill On)
- Any Day
- First day of new period (Cash)
- Last day of new period (Accrual)
- Mid-Cycle
- Specific Day of Month (breaks out from 2nd to 28th)
- Custom
Item
- Line Items
- Billing Items
Businesses (inactive if Source set to specific Patrol Work Orders, this is because specific Patrol Work Orders are always mapped to one Business)

All Businesses
Individual Businesses

Locations (inactive if Source set to specific Patrol Work Orders, this is because specific Patrol Work Orders are always mapped to one Location)

All Locations
Individual Locations

Toggle

Export CSV (if selected, will deliver to your internal Inteliguide Inbox a CSV version of the report generated according to your corresponding filter selections)

Filter Settings Example

Billing Notices (coming soon)
We'll soon release a Billing Notices feature that will help remind you what should be billed on any particular day. These notices will set your filters for you as you click to any Patrol Work Orders Report on the daily email list. But, before that's been fully completed and deployed, we also wanted to make it easier to discover through the filters all the various ways any individual Patrol Work Order is set to be billed.

Filters Automation: Selecting the Billing Source
Selecting an individual Patrol Work Order in the Billing Source filter (the first filter on the left) will result in all the filter settings automatically changing to feature its contract settings. This is to eliminate the guesswork involved in drilling down to your desired results.

Filters Automation: Selecting the Billing Cycle
Selecting a Billing Cycle will result in the Billing Period updating to reflect new options. The 'Monthly' settings will span the 1st of the month to the last day of your selected month. Selecting 'Custom' will give you the ability to select up to 31 days at a time, event between two given months, but will ONLY bring back results for Patrol Work Orders set for a Custom Billing Cycle. Selecting Semi-Monthly will divide each month from 1-15 and from 16-EOM (end of month). Selecting Weekly or Bi-Weekly will reset the Billing Period based on those intervals generated from your Billing Settings Period Start Dates.

Filters Automation: Selecting by Business
When your Billing Source is set to All Patrol Work Orders, you'll notice that the Business and Location filters are activated. Selecting the Business will refresh the Locations filter with all the available Locations that belong to that Business.

All of these automatic filter adjustments are emphasized with a yellow fading background so that you're informed about what has changed.

Export CSV Toggle
The only Toggle, once selected, will generate an export CSV file. It's off by default. The generated file will feature the full screen results reflecting your filter settings, and may take some time (not more than a few minutes) to be generated in its entirety and delivered to your Inteliguide Inbox.

Development Goals

In addition to covering prorated Flat Rate contracts and finishing up Email Billing Notices, we've also started work on adding Dedicated Work Orders as a Billing Source. After Dedicated Work Orders, we'll be adding support for Ad-Hoc Shifts as well, which will eventually replace Legacy Billing.

Report Screen Output Example (view is horizontally scrollable, so what is seen is a partial view of all report columns)

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