Term Creation

A Bill Term is the container for one billing cycle’s work. Every usage record, charge, calculation and posted bill belongs to a term, and no billing activity can happen without one.

Terms are created automatically. You do not schedule or open them by hand.

What decides when a term opens

Every Billing Period carries a cycle and a billing day — monthly on the 15th, weekly on a Tuesday. That period is attached to a Plan, and it travels down from there:

Billing Period          cycle + billing day
      ↓ attached to
    Plan
      ↓ inherited by
 Subscription
      ↓ which always sits inside a
Billing Account
      ↓ which is grouped into a
Billing Group

All four must share the same Billing Period. A Billing Account cannot hold subscriptions billing on different cycles, and a Billing Group cannot mix accounts billing on different days. The period is decided once, at the Plan, and everything above it inherits that decision.

How a term is created

A scheduled service — the billing orchestrator — runs continuously and asks one question: which Billing Groups fall due today?

For each one that does, it collects every Billing Account in that group and opens a Bill Term over them. That term is the working set for the cycle: those accounts, their subscriptions, and everything about to be calculated for them.

Because the whole hierarchy shares one Billing Period, the orchestrator never has to work out which accounts belong together — the Billing Group already answers that. It only has to work out when.

What a Billing Group is for

A Billing Group is simply a grouping of Billing Accounts, and how you group them is your decision.

A submetered billing provider might put one property owner’s thousand tenants into a single group, so that owner’s whole portfolio bills together. Or they might put two property owners into the same group because they want both processed in one run. Neither is more correct — the group exists so an operator can decide what runs together.

The only rule is the Billing Period: every account in a group must share one.

What the term holds

A Bill Term has two sections — one for the subscriptions being rated, one for the summary their values roll up into. See What a Bill Term Contains for how those two produce the bill.

What happens after a term opens

Once the term exists, it becomes the active billing period and the system is ready to collect and process billing data. The stages that follow are:

1. Upload or capture usage data
2. Upload manual charges and adjustments
3. Estimate missing values if required
4. Refresh arrears
5. Process bills
6. Post bills
7. Publish bills
8. Distribute bills
9. Reconcile payments
10. Close the term

Summary

A Bill Term is opened automatically for every Billing Group whose Billing Period falls due. It establishes the cycle used to collect usage, calculate charges, generate bills, and track everything through to payment.