Monthly customer billing is crucial to the team. Billing requests must be submitted in the first 2 weeks of the month. Billing triggers could be complex when an invoice has multiple lines and site addresses. In addition, we all have pressure to meet the deadline.
From there, I learned a new way to speed up the process. If all the site addresses are loaded in the system beforehand, I can also load a pre-formatted billing file made by Excel to match. By doing so I could accelerate producing the trigger key in the process and avoid mistakes.
When I proved this step one works well, a colleague from the billing team worked out the next with me. Every time when a new customer or multiple site addresses are required, I submitted a new account setup request and attached the formatted site address details in Excel into the system. Billing operations pre-loaded site addresses so that after an overnight system refresh, all site IDs were created and validated. The next day I could modify the billing lines from the Excel file, and upload all lines altogether into the billing system.
The new method significantly accelerated billing productivity at least one business day. In the past due to lack of communication and out-of-the-box thinking, both billing operator and my role duplicated the work by typing in the same address information into different systems to trigger the action. I am glad that we could save half effort to increase productivity, such as tracing and modify billing mistakes on time.
