19 Suspending Billing

Learn how to suspend billing for a select number of accounts in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM).

Topics in this document:

About Suspending Billing of Accounts and Bills

By default, BRM generates bills for all bill units in all accounts. When you run billing in BRM, active accounts as well as inactive and closed accounts are billed. However, you may have accounts or bill units that you do not want to bill. You can suspend billing for those accounts and bill units. You can later resume spending on suspended accounts and bill units.

Note:

  • By excluding accounts or bill units that do not need to be billed, you can reduce the time it takes to complete your billing run.

  • If you suspend an account, all nonpaying child bill units of the suspended account's paying parent bill units are also suspended.

  • To suppress billing, see "About Suppressing Bills". Unlike bill and account suspension, bill suppression does not inactivate bill units.

  • For information about another way to reduce the duration of your billing run, see "Splitting a Billing Run into Multiple Runs".

Suspending Billing of Closed Accounts

By default, you can configure BRM to enable or disable billing of closed accounts. When billing of closed accounts is disabled, BRM excludes closed accounts from the billing run when the following conditions are met:

  • The account's total balance due for every bill unit is zero.

    Note:

    The total balance due includes the totals from the nonpaying child bill units of an account's paying parent bill units.

  • The account has had no billable activity since the previous bill.

To enable billing of closed accounts:

  1. Go to BRM_home/sys/data/config.

  2. Use the following command to create an editable XML file from the billing instance of the /config/business_params object: 

    pin_bus_params -r BusParamsBilling bus_params_billing.xml

    This command creates an XML file named bus_params_billing.xml.out in your current directory. If you do not want this file in your current directory, specify the path as part of the file name.

  3. In bus_params_billing.xml.out, set StopBillClosedAccounts to enabled: 

    <StopBillClosedAccounts>enabled</StopBillClosedAccounts>

    The default value is disabled.

    Caution:

    BRM uses the XML in this file to overwrite the existing instance of the /config/business_params object. If you delete or modify any other parameters in the file, these changes affect the associated aspects of the BRM configuration.

  4. Save and exit the file.

  5. Rename the bus_params_billing.xml.out file to bus_params_billing.xml.

  6. Use the following command to load your changes into the /config/business_params object: 

    pin_bus_params bus_params_billing.xml

    You should run this command from the BRM_home/sys/data/config directory, which includes support files used by the utility. To run it from a different directory, see "pin_bus_params" in BRM Developer's Guide.

  7. Read the object with the testnap utility or the Object Browser to verify that all fields are correct.

    For general instructions on using testnap, see "Using the testnap Utility to Test BRM" in BRM Developer's Guide. For information on how to use Object Browser, see "Reading Objects" in BRM Developer's Guide.

  8. Stop and restart the Connection Manager (CM).

    For more information, see "Starting and Stopping the BRM System" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.

Suspending Billing of an Account's Bill

If you have additional bill units in accounts that you do not want to bill, such as inactive bill units, you can customize BRM to suspend billing of those bill units.