With Bill Presentment Architecture (BPA), you can customize the content and format of bills to be viewed online or printed by your customers and your internal users.
You can:
Design layout and select content for a bill
Display on bills information that is not stored in Oracle Receivables
Create hyperlinks that enable access to related billing information
Display summary and child lines
Provide online drilldown to transaction line details
Upload external templates
Incorporate attachments on online bills
Assign bill formats to specific customers or user-defined customer categories
Print transactions and bills
Preview billing templates using real-time data
You accomplish this by first configuring the BPA architecture, and then defining templates and assignment rules.
Your system administrator sets up the data sources, views, content items, and hyperlinks to be used in template design.
To enable access from an online bill to supporting information from Receivables, supplementary data source, or web page, add hyperlinks to content items in the templates that you define.
BPA collects, formats, and presents billing data online and in printed bills, according to templates that you define.
A template defines the content areas and content items of a bill. Each data attribute on a bill is a content item. You specify the content items that appear in each content area of a template. For example, you can specify that the bill-to address appears in the upper left corner of the bill. A template also determines the placement and format of the content items.
You can design new templates, use the default templates provided with BPA, upload external templates, or modify templates to suit your company or customer business needs. Using the desktop icons, you can easily create or modify templates graphically. Content areas can be split into as many areas as needed to create the desired layout. Content areas can be moved, duplicated, formatted, updated, or deleted.
When you create or customize templates, you design the layout and contents of a primary bill page and, if needed, a details page. The primary bill page has three content areas:
Header: This area includes information typically seen at the top of an invoice, such as the company's logo, transaction number, date, customer name, bill-to address, ship-to address, and terms.
Lines and Tax: This area contains the billing items, and can optionally include tax, for all transactions included in the bill. This section typically includes the item number, item description, quantities, and cost amounts.
Footer: This area includes information typically available at the bottom of an invoice, such as the total for the bill, aging, additional notes to the customer, and other messages.
You can create a details page for a template if your supplementary data source has a registered details page view. The details page contains supporting billing information from your supplementary data source such as Oracle Service Contracts. See: Details Page Design.
Note: After creating your billing template, you can preview and print it using actual customer data.
See: Template Management.
BPA assigns completed billing templates to customers based on the assignment rules that you define. Each rule uses predefined criteria with user-defined conditional values to match templates with customers.
When a user selects a bill to view or print, BPA applies the online or printed rules, in the order you specify, to determine which template to use.
For example, you can define a rule to use a template to display bills that are more than $10,000. Then, define a second rule to use a different template to display bills that are $10,000 or less.
You can assign different templates to be used for online bills and printed bills. You can also specify different rule order for online and printed bills.
See: Assigning Templates.