Sometimes, even with the best intentions, preparation and planning, life has a way of surprising us with the unexpected. Fortunately, when it comes to UtilAbility, if any unexpected issues arise, you can quickly and easily recognize and fix them.
We often receive calls for support from people needing help to resolve an issue they may find after they have calculated their bills. This may appear as a missing or incorrect amount billed or any number of things. UtilAbility provides several tools to help in these situations. There are meter reading lists you can review to make sure you have your readings entered correctly before you even begin to calculate your bills. Error information screens appear to help you identify any problems encountered during the calculation. If you are calculating metered services, an exception list screen will appear to show you any accounts with either no readings or multiple readings found within the period in which you are calculating.
Once completed, there are Billing Journals that you can review to confirm everything has been calculated correctly. In fact, you can review information any time you wish, in a variety of formats within UtilAbility.
When billing problems do occur, they are almost always easy to correct. They are usually the result of a problem in the way something has been setup or in the procedure that was followed leading up to the calculation. It is always best to correct any underlying issues (reasons for the problem) first, so the problem does not continue. Once you have found and fixed the underlying issues, you can fix your bill(s).
The easiest way to fix your bills is to recalculate them. You simply find your original bill calculation journal under Journals Maintenance, delete it and then recalculate your bills, just as you did before. Since you have resolved all your underlying issues, the recalculation will run correctly and you will obtain the results you expect. Any unaffected accounts will simply recalculate correctly as they did before.
Remember, after recalculating your bills, they will need to be re-prepared in order for the corrections to appear on your invoices. If you had already printed your invoices, you can reprint the corrected ones by specifying their account numbers or their page numbers if you wish.