Billing Agent

Purpose

Scenario in which the service provider creates bills and follows up receipt of payment for both its own services and those provided by third parties.

Receivables for which the customer is billed on behalf of other service providers are forwarded directly to the relevant service provider and do not appear (as revenue) in the billing agent’s general ledger.

Note Note

In this text, the billing agent is the distributor and the third party service provider is the supplier. The distributor bills grid usage as an own service and bills supply as a third party service. A supplier can also assume the role of billing agent.

End of the note.

The customer receives a bill from the distributor for all services. The customer also pays the resulting receivable to the distributor.

There are two different payment methods for this scenario:

  • Advance payment

    The distributor pays the billed amount to the supplier, who is the owner of the service Supply , regardless of whether or not the customer pays.

  • Customer payment

    The distributor only pays the supplier, who is the owner of the service Supply , after the customer has paid.

Implementation Considerations

You use the function described here if you are acting as billing agent for another service provider and you have access to all information needed to created the bills (for example, rate data, consumption data, and so on).

Features

Bill and payment processing in the billing agent scenario consists of the following individual processes:

  • Posting individual customer documents:

    • Billing and invoicing of third party service Supply at individual customer level.

    • Sending information on clearing or writing off individual customer bills to the owner of the service Supply .

  • Posting aggregated bills to the vendor account (FI-AP) or the contract account (FI-CA) of the supplier.

  • Posting payment and sending the payment advice note to the supplier.

    Note Note

    If you need to reverse a bill, only the bill in question is reversed and then reposted with a new aggregated document. The aggregated document, in which the bill was originally included, is not changed.

    End of the note.

Example

In the following example, the distributor carries out billing for the service types Supply and Grid Usage . However, the owner of the service type Supply is a third party service provider, the supplier. The distributor executes bill creation and payment processing. The customer receives a bill for all services.

The supplier provides meter reading results and rate information so that the distributor can carry out convergent billing and invoicing based on this data (Rate ready procedure).

However, the supplier can also transfer all billing documents so that only convergent invocing is necessary. (Bill ready procedure).

Depending on the payment method agreed upon between the distributor and the supplier, a transafer record is generated in table DFKKTHP either during invoicing (a), or when the customer pays (b). If you want to send an electronic bill with the relevant data about the third party services to the supplier in advance, table DFKKTHI is also updated during invoicing.

The billed services from service type Supply are combined in an aggregated item based on the transfer records. This results in a payment from the distributor to the supplier.

The distributor can send information to the supplier at various times by means of data exchange.

  • Information about customer payments

  • Information about writing off customer receivables

  • Payment advice note for payments made