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