Software > Metered Billing - Water
Our first exploration of this was metered water billing for a small water company. They owned a well and they distributed water to 18 properties. In addition to water, they also managed the roads and such for the small community, which was a trailer park.
1 - Instructions
We included an instructions worksheet in this workbook. Step by step written instructions. Tasks that are done less than 1x per week are much harder to learn to the point of route memorization and instead of trying to memorize them, one is best off just writing out instructions to be followed with each use.
2 - Properties
This is a default listing of all the properties and base billing amounts. This was only used as a template for the first set of bills. Subsequent sets are repeats of prior billing, but major changes and additions should also be tracked here (IMO).
3 - Invoice Ledger
All data needed for the bill is included in this line. One-to-many relationships with regards to line items being billed have been consolidated for simplicity.
4 - Other Fees
This worksheet is used to track other fees or credits that will need to be added to future invoices. If someone were to over pay or underpay their bill, that would be noted here. While this could be automatically included in future billing, for small needs manually including it was much simpler.
5 - Invoice X
Invoices are printed one at a time by selecting the name and invoice date from the drop downs. Only those invoices marked as being in the Print Queue show up in the list. Please note, this printing process can be automated with a mail merge add on. That is a very powerful utility that seems to work very well.
To and from addresses can be setup to use envelop windows and all aspects of this are customizeable.
To and from addresses can be setup to use envelop windows and all aspects of this are customizeable.
6 - Invoice Reporting
There is a nice, printable reporting worksheet included.
Summary
This is a very simple system. It only included total usage. It did not include current and last meter readings. Those were available to customers if requested. This could be modified to have included that information.