CostGuard Version 23.10 Details

Web Sales is an ongoing development effort to provide a complete web-based solution for managing the full scope of front office transactions including billing orders, tendered retail sales and direct invoice transactions.

Functional milestones will be deployed over a series of IDI platform software releases where each subsequent release builds on the prior one. This release provides enhancements for:

• Adding a bill payment to be tendered on a transaction
• Returning items and tendering a refund
• Voiding a previously submitted transaction
• Starting block Behavior options to streamline transactions by skipping New Transaction and/or Detail pages (for instance, on a disconnect customer or service order).
• Additional configuration options for certain starting actions that prepopulate the required order information (e.g. return reason).

For details regarding the overall objectives and planned future deliverables for web sales, refer to the IDI Knowledge Center > IDI Updates > Product Roadmap presentation.

Providers are moving away from paper billing to leverage the efficiency and cost benefit of electronic invoice delivery. Processing paper invoices is costly, uses valuable staff time and is prone to human error. Electronic delivery is faster, more efficient, and providers get paid sooner. Prior to this release, the CostGuard system had the capability to track whether an account should get a paper bill. This feature adds the ability to incentivize subscribers by providing a discount when paperless billing is chosen (or apply a charge when subscribers opt out).

AdvancePay in Paymentus Integration was originally released with CostGuard version 23.9. Version 23.10 provides the ability to filter the list of available services when adding automatic renewal services to a wallet in Customer Care.

Support for E911 management in web modules was originally provided in CostGuard version 23.7, and some enhancements were provided with CostGuard version 23.8. Version 23.10 provides the following enhancements:

• E911 information on services in CostGuard Client is read-only. This ensures service representatives use the superior functionality in the Orders and Customer Care web modules.
• Designating E911 Class of Service and Type of Service in web orders. When configuring E911 service addresses on an order, these parameters previously defaulted to values set in the Product Catalog. Now users can set these values when adding or modifying an E911 service via the APIs. The ability to set these values in the Orders user interface will come in a future release.

Customer Care and CostGuard Client orders provide the ability to enter a name or other information on a service; however, that capability did not exist when adding or editing a service in the Orders web module.

This release adds a field to enter such information on the transaction details screen when adding or editing a service in web orders.

Improvements to storing last modified date in CostGuard database tables make it easier for data engineers to analyze and troubleshoot issues where problems may occur during data transmission.

This adds a ServiceInformationItemID to the BillingOrderDetail OData in the Order Placement Web Service, and creates four new Data Lookups: BillingOrderDetailByServiceInformationItem, CartItemExtendedInformationItem, OrderExtendedInformationItem, and ServiceInformationItemExtendedInformationItem.

These enhancements let you build a workflow that passes extended information, for example, values on a service based on the ServiceInformationItemID provided. See the applicable API documentation in the IDI Knowledge Center for details.

Changes were made to prevent GL Journal Entry tables from overflowing their identity columns, which could potentially cause an outage for a customer.