Customer records

The customer record should be independent of any Account record, as the customer may have multiple accounts. Older-style billing systems focused on the parcel or address (for property taxes) or the meter (for utility billing). Modern billing systems focus on the customer and the management of customer information. Among other things it means that when a customer moves to a new address all of the data already exists and does not have to be re-keyed. Because some data is non-standard, either between customers or between different cities or utilities, a number of user-defined fields should be available in the billing system to support this need.

From Customer Management Fact Sheet which can be found at Public Sector Billing.

CIS Billing

Billing systems are as often as not these days called “CIS Billing” - meaning Customer Information System. A CIS sytem will have customer records that keep a history of contact with a customer (calls, correspondence, e-mail), their credit data such as credit rating or deposits, and theft and tampering history (for utilities). Other data could be as extensive as preferred language, banking data for direct debit, even preferred bill format and preferred bill delivery method, such as via e-mail rather than standard mail. Corporate customers may have extensive data relating to headquarters and branch locations, linked accounts or premises, and company representatives.

A Customer is not necessarily a person or business who receives regular bills. They may be someone who is an irregular contact. Nevertheless the CIS Billing system should retain their data for use when required.

From Customer Management Fact Sheet which can be found at Public Sector Billing.

Account Enquiries

A well-designed summary enquiry screen makes the job of the call center operator easier and increases throughput. The summary screen should provide at-a-glance information that will answer 80% of standard call center enquiries such as the due date for the current bill, whether a payment has been received, the next date a bill will be sent (based on a meter reading or an installment), or (via a graph) the consumption pattern on a utility bill. It should also provide via drill-down access to supporting detail. Where values have changed over time (property value or metered consumption) an enquiry at the line level of the bill should show how the charge was calculated.

From the summary page a list of hot links should give the user access to their most common actions. That is, a list of common actions should be able to be tailored by each operator. As well their should be access to the knowledge base of answers to frequently asked questions.

From Account Enquiries Fact Sheet which can be found at Public Sector Billing.

Account Contacts

A Billing system should support Contacts who have multiple Accounts, both at the same time (ownership of multiple properties) and over time (as a person buys and sells properties as their place of residence). Each Contact may have multiple addresses – work, home, mailing – each with their own attributes. The contact's primary information (date of birth, driver's licence) does not change and so forms part of the central record, but address information is more variable over time and should be part of a series of effective-dated sub-records, linked to the central or main record.

It is important that a record is kept on each Account for Contacts other than the person(s) legally responsible for paying the Account. There may be a person practically responsible for paying the Account, such as a parent, child or legal guardian, who would also receive a copy of the Bill at their own address. Generally this is known as “third-party billing”. As circumstances vary between cities or utilities, the ideal Billing system should not be prescriptive as to classifying such people; it should support user-definable categories.

From Account Contacts Fact Sheet which can be found at Public Sector Billing.

Account Relationships

"Some of the stand alone objects that are drawn into a relationship with the Account are the customer, the address or parcel (for property-based bills such as tax or utility bills), the services or valuations being billed on the address or parcel, the permits associated with the address (if property-based) or the customer, and the licences that customer holds or that have been granted for the business. Utility billing applications will also have information about the meter and its reading route and sequence."

From Account Relationships Fact Sheet which can be found at Public Sector Billing.

Account Attributes

"A carefully thought-out Account structure is the key to effective revenue management information. While the Account is itself a business object, with its own numbering rules and attributes, it also draws on other stand alone business objects such as the address or parcel of land and customer names, also known as Contacts.

Three attributes belong to the Account alone – the Account number, the Account type and the industry code.

One mistake some utilties make is to have the meter reading route number embedded in the Account number. This does not make for flexible solutions and modern utility billing applications should be able to show an Account's route details without embedding the data in the number.

Account type is not always used. The most common of these is the “owner” Account and the “Tenant” Account.

Finally the Industry Code should be an Account attribute. These are generally known as Standard Industry Codes (SIC) and each country publishes their own standard list."

From Account Attributes Fact Sheet, which can be downloaded from Public Sector Billing

Move In functionality

"One of the most labor-intensive actions is Moving a customer in or out, or sometimes between two properties within the area served by the one city or utility. The process should be highly configurable and should also allow for common events such as a change in date or a cancellation. With a cancellation the Move In or Out may have already been carried out in the billing system and have to be “undone”; a good billing system should support these actions as automatically as possible. Where a customer is transferring between properties, all of their banking and security deposit data should follow them to the new address." From Move In & Move Out Functionality Fact Sheet, which can be downloaded from Public Sector Billing

Permits

Permits are an integral part of public sector billing. A water utility, for example, may have permits for commercial users to add chemicals to their effluent - this is known as industrial or trade waste. Cities have permits for almost everything - one-off permits for the St Patrick's Day Parade; continuous permits for the coffee shop owner to have seating on the pavement. Any software selected for public sector billing should have a permitting module as integral to its functionality.

Utilities ICT spending up in Australia

IDC has released a new report titled, Australia Utilities Information and Communications Technology Market 2008-2012 Forecast and Analysis that focuses on the utilities sector in Australia, providing a map of where short- and longer-term opportunities can be found and highlights purchasing patterns for products and services by market.

Melissa Martin, Senior Market Analyst, IDC Australia said, "An example of a recent opportunity is part of the Victorian Government-mandated Advanced Metering Infrastructure project. Victorian utilities Jemena and United Energy Distribution have recently named key suppliers in their joint $65 million project to roll out one million smart power meters across Victoria."

"The project involves Accenture for systems integration and applications and Service Stream to install the meters and the two-way wireless communications infrastructure. The new smart meters will provide for remote reading, power failure notifications, remote connections and disconnections and give customers nearly real-time readings of their electricity so they can check energy consumptions and costs. Other state governments will implement similar smart meter projects over time."

The study also found that the top business priorities in the Utilities sector in 2009-2010 will include regulatory compliance, plant engineering, plant maintenance and outage, business intelligence, mobility and smart metering.

IDC forecasts the following for the Utilities sector in Australia:

· Based on IDC's updated forecasts, ICT spending by the Utilities market in Australia will grow from A$1,120 million in 2008 to A$1,308 million in 2012 – achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.0% for the forecast period.

· The Utilities market is a small and conservative spender on ICT and constitutes 2.8% of the total enterprise market in Australia. IT services spending makes up the lion’s share of utility industry spending – at 57%.

· The tight credit markets have already slowed capital spending in this industry and this is likely to continue through 2009. Fossil-fuelled and nuclear generation projects will suffer the worst due to high-risk profiles.

Is the Sun shining on Oracle?

Today's news that Oracle is taking over Sun is not good news. Sun's ownership of Java, its open and free database and its promotion of open standards must now be in doubt, as Oracle's interest is in pushing its proprietary standards. Oracle's attempt to shut down JD Edwards and PeopleSoft, once acquired, is still fresh in some people's mind.

Cities and the carbon tax

I sat in on a city meeting the other day where the officials were discussing the selection of a new piece of software. They needed to be able to record data that would enable the city to set out its carbon footprint. As the Obama Administration moves to institute a carbon tax or some other form of environmental levy, will cities be far behind in their grab for tax revenue? And how will their billing systems cope?

Water, water neverywhere

Water and its availability is looming as a large issue. Either there's perceived to be not enough, or residents won't accept recycling of water (the so-called "toilet-to-tap") for human consumption, or it's being polluted by wicked capitalists. New Scientist magazine often runs articles on water, as does The Economist. Stories about residents opposition to recycling (for their own consumption) are almost a weekly occurrence.

Mortgage fraud

The phrase "sub prime mortgage" really means a mortgage against a property of whatever value advanced to someone where the documentation was poor or non-existent, so the risk of default was commensurately greater. Some have argued that the policy of the Clinton administration in "encouraging" lenders to make mortgages available to the socially disadvantaged was responsible. Once the banks had had a solution for offsetting their lending risk peddled to them by the snake oil merchants of Wall Street, everyone else jumped in on the act. While the Community Reinvestment Act may have been introduced in 1977, its aggressive use started under the Clinton Administration. Some have suggested that a lesbian started the banks and other lending institutions towards that grand cock-up we have today, the financial mess on Wall Street. Her name is Roberta Achtenberg and she was Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under Clinton. Whatever the source (and there will have been many), billing in the public sector has been hit and will need tax increases to fulfill its community obligations. And the law enforcement folks should have years of work ahead of them.

Re-cycling

Many cities now provide for residents to place different types of trash in different receptacles, for collection. This is intended as an encouragement to re-cycling. In the resident's trash bill these containers are often identified separately to facilitate concessional charging. However there's a growing number of articles questioning the economics of segregating trash for recycling, including a New York City story that says that it's just plain uneconomic.

Vendors (more)

Public sector billing vendors are undergoing a consolidation at the moment. The tax billing field always was a fragmented one in the USA. Not so rates billing (the same thing) in Australia. There are only three major players (down from four) and one smaller player. The big players are Technology One (Proclaim), Civica (Authority) and Infor (Pathway PPR). Infor also has another product (Hansen), but that’s only installed in two or three sites world-side. Fujitsu Australia was also active but they were taken over ast year by Civica. You can find more details at Public Sector Billing

Vendors

Public sector billing for water billing is undergoing some significant consolidation right now. Systems & Software was taken over by Harris Computer Systems, which at last count had 13 public sector billing applications in its portfolio. SAP is lurking, as always, although the problems reported with its implementation in Dallas don't tell a great story. And then there's Infor's Hansen product, the Web version of which is now in production in tiny Sherwood, OR as well as under way at SAWS (San Antonio), TX. More information about water billing can be found at Public Sector Billing

Public Sector Billing

Welcome to this Blog that's all about billing in the public sector. You what? Yes, when your local government values your property and sends you a tax or rates notice, or your water company reads your meter and sends you a bill, it's a public sector billing activity. This Blog is all about the issues to do with public sctor billing, and you can find out more about this sort of thing at sites like Public Sector Billing