Click here for a sample Billing Update Preview report
This report provides a best effort guess at the number and types of bills that will be created the next time you run either the BIlling Update or the Issue Label update. This is helpful when you need to be sure that you have enough forms, envelopes and other materials on hand. We say "best effort guess" because the exact number of bills that will be generated will change from day to day as you enter orders, payments and other transactions.
What you will get from this report is the following:
Counts of the numbers of bills that will be produced, broken down by billing effort number
The number of subscriptions that will be suspended because they have reached the suspend point in their billing series.
The number of subscriptions that will be cancelled for nonpayment because they have reached the end of their billing series.
Counts of the numbers of bills that will be produced, broken down by package code.
An optional detailed list of the subscribers that will be suspended or cancelled as a result of running the update.
The update will be run ___ days after the current date
In order to make the estimate as accurate as possible you must specify when you intend to run the update. Because billing is controlled by date intervals the date you specify can have a major effect on the number of bills produced. For example, suppose your billing series is set to create bills at 28 day intervals. If you tell the report that you intend to run the billing update next Monday and that happens to be 27 days after the last time you ran the update then the report will correctly predict that you won't get very many bills. Change the date to one day later and it will predict that all of those subscribers that received a bill from the last billing update run will get another bill, assuming they haven't already paid or cancelled.
The date is specified as an interval after the current date so that you can save your report filter on a job list and not have to change the date each time you run it.
Report bills that would be sent if the billing update were run before the next issue is served
Choose this first option if you intend to run the billing update before serving an issue. Remember that the first bill for new subscriptions is generally not sent until after the first issue has been served, so you may get fewer bills if you run the billing update before the issue label update.
Report bills that would be sent when the next issue is served
The issue label update can create bills for new subscriptions if you use the "bill with issue" option on your publication definition screen or the offer definition screen. The issue label update can only produce the first bill in the billing series—all other bills are produced by the billing update.
Report bills that would be sent if the billing update were run after the next issue is served
Choose the last option if you intend to run the billing update after serving the next issue. You should expect to get more bills produced if you run the updates in this order, since the billing update will not bill new subscribers that have yet to receive any issues unless you are using the "bill immediately" option on the publication definition screen or the offer definition screen.
Include a list of subscribers that will be suspended or cancelled.
Check this box and you will get a detail list of the subscribers who will "drop off" as a result of running the update. This can be useful if you have a number of high profile subscribers where a telephone call or some other kind of intervention is in order before they are suspended or cancelled.
Click here for more information about Filter screens and Options for running reports.