WaterSight - Customer Billing

Overview

Administration page to upload customer meter billings. This information can be uploaded through an Excel or CSV file. Atemplate is available for download in the Digital Twin Setup page, under Download Templates (Monthly Billing file). The template file that must be completed is composed by the following columns:

• ID:  ID of the customer meter. Required field. Must be unique for each meter and must match the ID provided in the  Meters Characteristics page. This ID should also match the Billing ID field in the uploaded WaterGEMS hydraulic model, in case customer meter elements exist. 
• Billing month: month which the billing is referred to. Required field. 
• Value: value of the monthly billing volume. Required field. 
• Units: billing volume units. Options available are: m³, hft³, hgal (U.S), kgal (U.S). Required field. 

To upload the billings into WaterSight the user can fill the "Monthly Billing" tab included in the general configuration excel file, or just use the Monthly Billing template that can also be downloaded from the application. Note that if uploading the configuration excel file, there must exist a tab  called "Monthly Billing" and the columns headers labels must not be changed (this same rule applies when uploading the separated Monthly Billing CSV file).

There should be only one billing record per customer per month. If billing data exists with more than one record per customer per month, each customer data should be integrated to monthly values.

Figure below shows the template excel file that must be completed and then imported into WaterSight. 

Figure 1 - Customer Billing template file

The user can import several files iteratively - where each file represents a billing month - or just one file with all historical billing information. Customer billings should be uploaded once every month, to make sure that water balance data is kept up to date. Customer billings should come from the commercial system, to assure that the most up to date information is imported into WaterSight. 

Note: If uploading using a CSV file, the supported date formats are the following: yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy-mmm-dd

Action Buttons

• Delete - will delete all the billing history. 
• Import/Update - used to import billing data, or to update new billing data referred to new billing months. 
• Recompute Data - if a user deletes the billing history and imports again a file with the billings related to historical months (which billings had already been imported at least once in the past), the historical water balances calculated by the software do not update automatically and the user needs to click on the Recompute button.

After importing the billing file the first time using the Import/Update button, the user can use the same button to update billings referred to the new billing months. In this case the new billing file structure can be the following:

• file with all the billing history plus the billings referred to the new billing month
• file with only the billings referred to the new billing month.

Please note than when using the Import/Update button only the billings related to the new billing month get updated, even if in the new billing file contains all billing history (updated). In case the user wants to replace all the billing history that had been previously updated in WaterSight by a new updated version, the user needs to use the Delete button to remove all the existent billings, and then import the new billing file. 

Billing Table

The information provided here is just a summary of all billing records inserted by the user. Through this table the user can easily understand which billing months were uploaded, and the number of customers and billing records uploaded in each month. The number of customers and monthly billing records uploaded for each month should match, unless there were customers uploaded that are not served anymore by the water utility (and therefore have no revenue). In this last case, best practice would be to also exclude those customers from the Customer Billing file. 

See also

 WaterSight - Learning Resources Guide