CostGuard Version 20.11 Details

For retail installment plans, the Quantity field has been renamed Remaining Installments and the following fields have been added: Down Payment and Collected First Installment. Also, for returned items (Icon is colored red), Quantity is forced to be consistently negative (remains positive for new items sold).

The Portal page name is configurable via a new setting under MANAGE > Settings > General. The setting also applies to the View selector label. Both default to Partner Portal.

The search results page has an Export option in the lower right corner.

On Location Search, there is an option to include disconnected services in the search results. This option is unchecked by default (do not include disconnected services). Also, a column has been added to the search results Location tab to display the disconnect date of disconnected services.

AR 8534 (CostGuard version 19.11) provided the ability for Workbooks to create orders in the Orders web application for disconnecting, hotlining/redirecting, suspending or restoring an account, rather than using CostGuard billing orders. However, the orders created were not adding account-level change reasons to customer accounts which is necessary for auto-restore to work correctly. This enhancement adds a Use Service Level Change Reasons option to the Automatic Restore Option window. This option ignores the suspend reason at the customer level and makes sure there is at least one service with an eligible reason before invoking the workbook action.

This release provides an option for enhanced prorating functionality. This will change how prorated charges are calculated across multiple bill periods. When this functionality is enabled, billing periods where the charge applies are evaluated individually based on the number of days in the specific bill period (month) to more accurately prorate each portion of the charge.

This enhancement is off (disabled) by default, which maintains the existing prorating functionality. In this case, for a charge that is back-dated and/or end-dated where the date is in the middle of a bill period, the total number of days to be charged is computed and prorated based on the number of days in the current month.

Note: An IDI resource is required to enable this functionality. Contact your IDI support team or account manager for assistance.

The Calculate Taxes operation in the Tax Management API (originally provided with CostGuard version 20.9) has been enhanced to support generating taxes for products that are configured with a private line tax class. Partial allocations (that sum to 100%) can be provided in the API request. Prior to this release, the API could only support a single 100% allocation for a product with a private line tax class.

Refer to the applicable Web API documentation available via the IDI Billing Solutions Knowledge Center for details on using this API.

This release provides capability to omit specific service types from the detail sections of invoice XML. A new setting allows an Invoice Format to be configured to exclude specific service types in detail sections of base invoice XML for that format. This can help reduce the number of pages in customers’ invoices, for example when certain service types take up multiple pages with the same product repeated many times on many service numbers.

Service types to omit are specified via a new setting in Invoice Format configuration in Admin Console. Note: This setup must be completed by an authorized IDI associate. The setting is not available to CostGuard users. Contact your IDI support team or account manager for assistance.

A new setting in Customer Care (MANAGE > Settings > Billing > Capture Address Information) lets you choose to capture address information used for taxing purposes. This includes the address of the account, as well as addresses of all services on the account. This supports fulfilling audit requests for street address information when taxing jurisdiction is not sufficient.

Address(es) used for taxing purposes are accessible for each invoice generated during billing. CostGuard also stores any tax jurisdiction overrides on the account or service at the time of billing so that situations where the address does not match the jurisdiction used can be identified.

Note: This information is available in the core database only. The information is not available on CostGuard displays or standard reports.

An enhancement to Market configuration lets you independently manage static text for customer invoices. The Market Configuration form in Admin Console > Data Management has a new Invoice tab with two supplemental text fields for presentation on invoices.

The Location Charge Summary optional XML report has been updated to break out Partner Services amounts separately in the summary and detail sections. Products are considered Partner Services products based on specific Product Catalog configuration.

The Create Customer, Contact Created, and Contact Modified Workflow Triggers have been added to CostGuard Client. These triggers will now fire from both web apps and CostGuard Client whenever creating/modifying contacts on accounts and services.

Two new user permissions let you break out authorization for adding and managing documents separately:

• Add documents – Lets you add a document using the Attach Documents button in the document tray.
• Manage documents – Lets you edit, replace and delete a document using the icons in the document tray.

The ability to add and manage documents was previously granted for Roles having the Allow Logon permission. Going forward after taking this release, Roles that have the Allow Logon permission will need to be updated with the Add documents and/or Manage documents permissions as needed. For this release, this functionality applies to the Inventory and Orders web modules. Roles related to these modules should be updated.