Viewing and Editing Organization Configuration - m3ter Documentation

Settings > Organization Configuration

At Settings > Organization in the Console, you can view and edit the details of your Organization’s configuration:

• Currency. The default currency defined for your Organization is shown under Organization configuration details. You can use the Currency settings page to create and manage currencies and currency conversion rates. See Creating and Managing Currencies for more details.
• Billing in arrears/advance
• Bill auto-approval
• Scheduled bill interval
• Timezone
• Epochs for billing
• Days before bill due
• External invoice date
• Bill statements
• Bill numbering
• Suppress empty bills
• Consolidate bills
• Credit application order
• Use unified drawdowns
• Allow overlapping attached plans

This topic explains the various settings available for configuring your Organization and how to edit those settings to meet your requirements. To view and edit your Organization’s configuration:

1. Select Settings > Organization. The Organization page opens with the Configuration tab selected. You can view your Organization details at the top of the page.

• Select Copy against the Organization ID string to copy it to your clipboard.

2. To edit the configuration, on the Organization configuration details panel select Edit. The Organization configuration page opens.
3. Work down the page to edit the setting for your m3ter Organization - required settings have a red asterisk against them:

Billing in arrears/advance

You can select to bill in arrears or advance for:

• Standing charge billing. Default is to bill in arrears. You can override the Organization setting when you create Plan Templates and Plan Groups. See Reviewing Options for Plans and Plan Templates.

• Minimum spend billing. Default is to bill in arrears. You can override the Organization setting:

• For Product minimum spend when you create Plan Templates and Plan Groups. See Reviewing Options for Plans and Plan Templates.

  • For Pricing minimum spend when you price a Plan or Plan Template. See Reviewing Pricing Options for Plans and Plan Templates.

• Prepayments/Commitment fee billing. Default is to bill in advance. You can override the Organization setting when setting up Prepayment fee billing with a Plan. See Prepayment Billing with a Plan.

Bill auto-approval

• Auto-approve bills. You can enable for bills to be automatically approved after a defined grace period.
• Once enabled, you can define the Bill auto-approval grace period (in minutes, hours, or days) following bill creation, after which the bills will be automatically approved.
• For example, suppose you are using a monthly billing frequency for an end customer Account and Bills are created at 12 midnight on the the last day of each month. You then enable Auto-approve bills and set the Bill auto-approval grace period to 2 hours. Each month’s Bill is approved automatically at 2 a.m. on the first day of the month following.

Warnings!

• Possible Conflict between Auto-Approval of Bills and Scheduled Bill Interval! If a Bill is recalculated because of late-arriving data after being auto-approved, and the bill auto-approval interval is less than 24 hours, then the Bill will revert to a pending, unapproved state:
  • We recommend setting the auto-approval interval to 24 hours or longer when using scheduled bill updates.
  • Please see Understanding the Scheduled Billing Process for more details.
• Auto-Approval tied to Bill date! If you generate a Bill early and before the scheduled Bill date, it will not be auto-approved from the date/time you do this, but only at the specified time after the Bill date.

Scheduled bill interval

Define an interval in minutes or hours for when you want Bills to be updated:

• If you select for daily Bill updates (24 hours), you can also use the Scheduled bill offset option to specify which hour of the day the scheduled Bill update will run.
• For more details, see Scheduling Billing.

Timezone

Use the drop-down list to select the timezone for your Organization. For more details and guidance on timezone settings, please see the Timezone Settings - Notes and Recommendations topic.

Epochs

Define the Epoch dates for your Organization. Epoch dates for billing periods: Year, Month, Week, and Day define the date when the first Bill is created for Accounts and then act as a reference for when in the applied billing frequency period subsequent bills for Accounts are created:

• For example, suppose you attach a Plan to an Account where the Plan is configured for monthly billing frequency and you’ve defined the period the Plan will apply to the Account to be from January 1st, 2022 until January 1st, 2023. You then set a Month Epoch date of February 15th, 2022. The first Bill will be created for the Account on February 15th, and subsequent Bills created on the 15th of the months following for the remainder of the billing period - March 15th, April 15th, and so on.
• The defaults are:
  • Year Epoch. January 1st, 2021.
  • Month Epoch. January 1st, 2021.
  • Week Epoch. January 4th, 2021.
  • Day Epoch. January 1st, 2021.
• Note that you can override the Epoch dates for billing configured for your Organization:
  • At individual Account level using the Billing cycle date setting for an Account - see Creating, Editing, and Deleting Accounts.
  • When you attach a Plan or Plan Group to an Account to create an Account Plan or Account Plan Group, you then have the option to override the Billing cycle date setting for the Account. See Attaching Plans to an Account and Attaching Plan Groups to an Account.

Days before bill due

Enter the number of days after the Bill generation date that you want to show on Bills as the due date:

• You can also define this at the individual Account level - see Creating an Account. This is useful for cases where you want Bills for your end-customer Accounts to show different due dates. The setting at individual Account level takes precedence over any setting at Organizational level.

External invoice date

For your accounting purposes, select which date you want to use for external invoicing with respect to billing periods - two options:

• First day of next period. Select this if you want to recognize usage revenue in the following period. This is the default.
• Last day of arrears. Select this if you want to recognize usage revenue in the same period that it’s consumed, instead of in the following period.

Bill statements

Use this panel to set Organization defaults for Bill Statements:

• Statement definition. Select the default Statement definition for your Organization.
• Auto-generate statements. Select for auto-generation of Bill statements when Bills are either approved or locked:
  • None. Disable auto-generation.
  • JSON. Auto-generate Statements in JSON format only
  • JSON and CSV. Auto-generate Statements in both JSON and CSV format.

Bill numbering

You can use two settings to control how you want to number your Bills:

• Select Enable bill numbering. The two settings are activated. (Default is disabled):
  • Bill prefix. Enter a string as prefix for Bill numbering.
  • Bill sequence start. Enter a start number from which Bills will be numbered in time sequence according to date/time the Bill was first created.
  • For example, if you enter INVOICE- for Bill prefix and 100 for Bill sequence start, the first Bill generated after you update your Organization configuration will have a REFERENCE number of INVOICE-101.
• If you do not enable Bill numbering for your Organization, then a default numbering is used for the Bill REFERENCE number:
  • The default number is composed using INV- as a prefix concatenated with the last four characters of the Bill ID. For example, if the last four characters of a Bill’s ID are 7c19, then the Bill REFERENCE number will be INV-7c19.

Important! We strongly recommend that you enable Bill numbering for your Organization to ensure reliable numbering of Bills sent through to your Accounts Receivable system.

Suppress empty bills

Enable this switch if you want to prevent generation of Bills that contain no line items. Default is disabled.

Consolidate bills

Enable this switch if you want to consolidate different billing frequencies into a single bill. Default is disabled.

• If disabled, Bills are created by bill date and billing frequency.
• If enabled, charges that are billed on a given bill date are automatically added to the bill regardless of charge billing frequency.
• For example, if you enable this option and charges are due on an Account for an invoice date of February 1st:
  • For standing charges and usage charges under a monthly-billed Plan.
  • For Prepayments fees billed annually.
  • For ad-hoc charges on Accounts.
  • For Balance charges.
  • Then, the billing frequencies for the different charges are ignored and a single Bill is created for the Account for the invoice date and covering all of these charges. In contrast, if Consolidate bills is disabled, then in this example separate bills would have been created.

Warnings! Consolidating bills:

• If you’ve already run billing with Consolidate bills disabled for your Organization but you then enable it, subsequent Bills for specific bill dates will now start afresh and not update earlier non-consolidated Bills for the same bill date. In almost all cases, this will result in duplicate bills for the same Account.
• Similarly, if you’ve already run billing with Consolidate bills enabled, you’ll be left with the old consolidated Bill for an Account - which is no longer updated - and start generating new Bills for the same Account at, for example, monthly frequencies.
• We therefore recommend caution if you need to switch to or from Consolidate bills, and, to avoid any of these unwanted billing conflicts, suggest you archive any earlier versions of Bills or delete them entirely.
• If you enable the Consolidate bills option, when you run Bills manually using the Run Billing modal, the Bill frequency option to run billing only for Bills of a certain frequency will not be available. See Running Bills Manually.

Credit application order

Select the order in which any Prepayment/Commitment or Balance amounts on end customer Accounts are to be drawn-down against for billing. Four options:

• Prepayment then Balance. Draw-down against Prepayment credit before Balance credit. Default.
• Balance then Prepayment. Draw-down against Balance credit before Prepayment credit.
• Prepayment only. Only draw-down against Prepayment credit.
• Balance only. Only draw-down against Balance credit.

Important!

• You can override the setting for Credit application order you select for your Organization at the individual Account level under Bill settings. See Creating an Account.
• If an Account belongs to a Parent/Child Account hierarchy, then the Credit application order settings are not available, and the draw-down order defaults always to Prepayment then Balance order.

Use unified drawdowns

Enable this switch if you want to implement the Unified Balance Drawdown model for your Organization.

• If enabled, the billing engine considers all eligible Balances on an Account grouped together rather than one at a time. A max-flow algorithm with iterative optimizations is then applied to achieve the best coverage for draw-down against the available Account credit. See New Unified Balance Drawdown.
• Default is disabled.

Allow overlapping attached plans

• Enable this switch if you want to allow multiple plans for the same Product to be active on an Account at the same time.
• For some billing use cases, you will need to enable this option. For example, if you intend to bill end-customer Accounts on a Contract basis and your billing use case requires some charges for a Product to be billed under one Contract and other charges for the same Product to be billed under a different Contract, you’ll need different and overlapping Account Plans to be attached to an Account for the same Product but linked to different Contracts. See Setting Up Contract Billing.
• Default is disabled.

4. When you have completed your editing changes, select Update organization configuration. Your changes are saved and you are returned to the Organization page.