...
Depending on Organizational needs, there are three recommended practices for tracking Service Features within PCR-360.
| Recommended Method | Billing | Easy Tracking | Visibility on the Bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Using Charges |  |  | |
| Using UDFs | | | |
| Hybrid Charges-UDFs | | | |
To help illustrate the usage of tracking these Service Features, we will be using the example of Voicemail.
Understanding the available tools
UDFs
Through the use of User-Defined Fields, your Organization can set up any number of fields desired for the Service Features.
Example Service Features:
- Automatic Callback
- Automatic Redial
- Call Forwarding
- Caller ID
- Call Waiting
- Three-Way Calling
- Voicemail
When creating these UDFs to represent a feature, PCR recommends using the Checkbox field type to indicate if the feature is present on the Service. These UDFs can be associated with one or more different Services Catalogs so Users do not need to create separate UDFs for Voicemail for a Business Line and for a Cellular Phone.
Charges
No matter what method your Organization does for tracking Service Features if there are plans to Bill, some form of Charge Catalogs will be needed to manage the Charges.
It is strongly encouraged to create new Charge Catalogs to represent the Service Feature fees so that they can be changed and updated independently from other Services to ensure clean billing.
Note: To show on a Bill, an item must be Active and Assigned to an Owner. Services will not appear on a Bill until they have been activated and assigned an Owner, and as such, any Service Features on the Service will also no appear.
Examples
Using Charges
When using Charges to track a Service Feature, the feature will be directly visible on a Bill under the Service. This makes it clear to those reviewing the Bill what is related to their Service. However, when looking at the Service, it may not be intuitive for managing the Service's related features to look at the Charges Grid on the Service to see what features are currently on the Service. This also can make reviewing what features are available for a Service rather difficult because a User would need to know what Charge Catalogs are allowed to be on their Service. For Billable Service Features, which are available for all Services, when there is not a notably long list of Service Features that will be offered within your Organization, this can be a simple solution for tracking purposes. When not Billing for a Service Feature, using Charges to track the use of Service Features might look strange, since these would have to be represented by Charges of $0.00 on the Service for every Billing Cycle.
Using UDFs
When using UDFs to track a Service Feature, the feature can be directly requested within CustomerCenter, and makes identifying the presence of the feature quickly accessible from internal application records. However, this will not cause the feature to appear on the Bill, which may make the User of the Service confused when they review their Bill. When not Billing for use of a Service Feature, using UDFs is the recommended method for tracking Service Features. The use of UDFs makes it very clear internally what is available, and what is presently active for the Service via the UDF Tab.
Using a combination of UDFs and Charges
When using both UDFs and Charges to track Service Charges, your Organization can get the best of both other methods, with only adding a little extra complexity to ensure the status of the Charges is synchronized with the UDF fields. Through the use of a Custom Event your Organization can setup an internal process that when a Service Feature is added or removed from a Service, the Charge will be directly added or stopped on the Service. This does have the limitation of not being able to apply the Charge to the Service Order where the work for the change was done. When Billing for a Service Feature, this is the recommended method for use in tracking Service Features. When not Billing for a Service Feature, this is still the encouraged method, so that the Bill will be the clearest as to what a User is being charged for.
Sample Custom Event to Sync UDFs and Charges
(this section needs to wait until the code is reviewed, and should be an excerpt to pull in that code from a Custom Event Library page)