I am experiencing a problem with Expiring/Changing Billing Items... Here is a description of what I need and what is happening; I have a Billing Item "56KB Dialup" which is worth 1 month of internet service. I also have a Billing Item "Email Only" is is worth 1 month of service. We have setup all accounts to be invoiced on the 20th of the month with actual billing happening on the 25th of the month. All accounts are for the calendar month so the subscription runs from the 1st to the last day of the month. We invoice 11 days prior to expiration and bill 5 days prior to expiration. Everything is working fine except.... I have several customers that have requested to have their 56KB Dialup account switched to the Email Only account at the expiration of their current dial-up account subscription period. So we went into the billing service item (56KB Dialup) for each of these accounts and set them upto auto-change the billing item on 11/1/04 to the Email Only Accounts. That all appeared simple and straight forward. However, on 10/20 instead of these accounts being invoiced for the Email Only service they received an invoice for the 56KB Dialup service again. What did we do wrong? I had expected these accounts to be invoiced for the Email Only service which the account would switch to on 11/1 not the current 56KB Service for the account.
Under the Maintenance & Preferences -> General Preferences -> Invoicing, make sure you have the Auto-Change Billing Cycle Items When Needed setting set to Yes.
I do... But I have the auto-change date set to 11/1/04. This is the date that the existing "56KB DialUp" account is due to expire. Will the system know on 10/20 to bill for autochanging items in the future? I don't want the account to changes billing items until the customers current billing cycle expiration date.
It will not change the billing cycle until that date. So if you are setup to invoice before that date, you would want to make that date sometime prior to that invoice date.
But would it then pro-rate the remaining months time under the new billing cycle item? The customer has paid for the full month of October to be a 56KB Dialup customer. They wanted to continue with dial-up service until 10/31 and switch at the first of the month to the Email Only account. If I set the change billing item sooner won't it shutoff their dial-up service based on the change billing cycle date and not the account expiration date? It sounds like this may not work the way I had hoped...