October 2012
Ensure Timely Customer Payments through Budget Billing
Level Billing
Ensure Timely Customer Payments through Budget Billing
ASI can help utilities receive timely customer payments through Budget Billing solutions such as Equal Payment Plans or Level Billing.
With each of these options, on-demand status reporting ensures that no customers fall behind on their actual account balances. In addition, draft processing is available to automatically pick up the owed amount to the utility. If a customer is late on a payment, all delinquent/penalty processing also takes either plan into account when processing.
Features of the Budget Billing solutions include:
- Customer pays the same amount every month
- Customers can sign up for the plan at any time (based on utility’s policies)
- At settle-up time, the customer balance (credit or debit) may be rolled into the next equal payment period or the system can be set up to require payment for debit balances and refunds for credit balances
- After settle-up, the system automatically calculates a new Equal Payment Plan for the customer
- The equal payment calculation builds in a “buffer” to help ensure that customers never get far behind on their actual account charges.
Level Billing
- During each billing period, an average is calculated for the previous 12 months of billing which “levels” the bill every month
- Customers can sign up for the plan at any time (based on the utility’s policies) No settle-up is required.
- Bills show the customer actual balances along with equal payment balances
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Customer service representatives can use an Account Average calculation program to calculate the average for any customer at any time.
