>If you have configured Emerald to use a Monthly billing cycle (in other
>words, to prorate new accounts through the first of the upcoming
>calendar month, and to generate invoices for all existing accounts on
At first we were going to do just that.... but we changed our minds and
decided to go with an anniversary billing cycle.
We set to the Billing Cycle of Anniversary as Renewel and Anniversary in
it's configuration. Our thoughts were that it would be easier having
payments spread throughtout the month and additionally, when we created a
new customer in Emerald (using Monthly Billing Cycle) it would pro-rate a
charge to the start of the next month... but, generally customers that sign
up are already paying for a month so that left us deleting the pro-rated
charge and having to create a pro-rated invoice manually for the following
month... that's what we thought we'd have to do... maybe I missed something...
So that's why we're going with Anniversary Billing Cycle as above...
What was (is) confusing is a large part of our customers that we're
inputting now expire on the 1st of the month... they're not paid thru that
date but "to" that date... so my thoughts were to expire them on the 30th
and that's why the questions...
Here's a tricky one... would it be better to set them as Paid Thru 9/31/99
(if it would take it) so that each month it would expire on the last day of
the month? ...or how do we set the Paid Thru date so that it's not the 1st
of the month...
Technically, our customers now are paid on a month by month basis... so
they should be inactive on the 1st and not the 2nd... picky, yea I know...
I'm really just trying to understand this...
The reason for all this is to have a consistant answer for when someones
account will expire... we're planning to send e-mail invoices out say... 5
days ahead of the due date and having the permanent expire set to say...
15... that way 20 days after the invoice date the account will become
inactive (if payment isn't made).
>marked paid. Although technically a user who pays a bill in advance for
>a month of service starting on 9/1/99 is paid through 9/30/99, Emerald's
>monthly billing routines set the start date of the invoice to 9/1/99 and
>the end date of the invoice to 10/1/99. If the invoice is paid, the
OK, I can understand that.... basically, we probably just have to accept
that as default instead of trying to reset everything to say... 9/30/99.
>start date of the invoice). If you have a Monthly billing cycle
>configured for an account whose Billed Thru or Expire dates do not fall
>on the first of the month, you will get an error each time you open that
>MBR asking you to correct the invalid date, and invoices may not be
>correctly generated.
Right, I've seen that while we've been configuring and adding customers...
>
>If you will be using Anniversary billing for all new accounts, and want
>your existing entered accounts to have a start date for their next bill
>of 9/30/99 (e.g., a 1-month bill would be for 9/30/99-10/30/99), then
>you can execute the change below without creating any problems.
>
>If you need clarification on the above, don't hesitate to ask.
>>
>> update masteraccounts
>> set paidthru=9/30/1999
>> where paidthru=10/1/1999
>>
It didn't work.... I left out the "where paidthru=10/1/1999" (since all the
ones in there are 10/1/99) and it set all of the Paid Thru dates as
"1/1/1900". ooooooops....
It's SQL 7... I'm still trying to figure out the datetime format... any
suggestions?
Thanks for your time.
David
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