CostGuard Version 20.11 Details

Customer Care

FR 3304

Retail History – enhanced retail installment plan 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).

Customer Care

FR 3323

Configurable Partner Portal page name

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.

Inventory

FR 3325

Ability to export search results

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

Inventory

FR 3326

Include disconnected services on location search

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.

Treatment/Credit Scoring

AR 8724

Enhanced auto restorefunctionality in collections workbooks

AR 8534 ( 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 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.

RateBill

FR 3142

Improved proration of new charges across billperiods

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.

RateBill

AR 8612

Tax management API enhancements to fully support private line taxes

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.

RateBill

AR 8620

Exclude service types from detail sections of baseXML

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.

RateBill

AR 8662

Capturing tax address information at time of billing

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.

RateBill

AR 8710

Market configuration enhancements for invoice presentment

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.

RateBill

AR 8734

Breaking out charges for partner services oninvoices

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.

Workflow

AR 8729

Support Workflow Triggers in IDI Desktop Client

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

Document Storage

FR 3296

Separate permissions for adding and managing documents

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.

Customer Care

83565

Fix Usage Balance display to show 0 instead of error when using dynamic units

The Usage Balance page in Customer Care was showing an error (Data – NaN undefined Available) in cases where number of units = 0 when Unit Balance for Data Display (MANAGE > Settings > General) was set to Dynamic.

This page has been fixed to show 0 (zero) instead of the error in this case.

Customer Web Service

83571

Fix contact created trigger to correctly set the IsNewcustomer value

When creating a new contact on an existing CostGuard account, the Contact Created trigger was incorrectly setting the IsNewcustomer value to True.

The trigger has been fixed to correctly have a value of False for existing accounts.

RateBill

83572

Tax Management API fails if backbone settings do notexist

The Tax Management API failed with an HTTP 400 response and error message of Tax Loader failed to load TaxSettings, logging number 500700. This occurred when one or more expected Backbone settings did not exist. This was experienced in a non-production environment where it would be more likely for settings to be missing.

The Tax Loader has been updated to provide appropriate default values for the Backbone settings that do not exist. If a Backbone setting is missing, there will no longer be an error and the appropriate default value will be used.

RateBill

83574

Tax Jurisdiction Verification

Per-line taxes were assessed in the incorrect jurisdiction for an account. This occurred for an account with multiple services in different jurisdictions within the same state. This did not happen in all cases and was dependent on the order services were processed by the tax engine and the specific taxes associated to the jurisdictions for the services on the account. When this occurred, it also caused unexpected taxes to be assessed for jurisdictions that should not have been included, e.g. a tax for a jurisdiction of a disconnected service. This issue was introduced in CostGuard 20.4 with PR 83428.

Tax logic has been updated so that per-line taxes will now assess correctly, and only in the jurisdiction(s) in which they should, based on the jurisdiction assigned to the service (or account).

Payment Processing

83555

Fixes for CreateEpayTransaction operations

The CreateEpayTransaction workflow action did not handle failed payments gracefully. It would throw an exception rather than handle it internally. This resulted in retrying any failed transaction, causing CostGuard to double refund customers.

These Workflow actions have been updated so that exceptions go into a status of Error which prevents Workflow from auto retrying them.

Bulk Data Feature Import

83566

Bulk Data Feature Import performance Issues

The Bulk Data feature import was running slowly when the import file contained many records to add features (action = Create).

Changes were made to improve performance of the Feature Import.

No updates for this release