After we have established a connection for you to a telephone switch, a data network, or a cable television service, you will be billed for the installation of your connection. You will also be billed on a monthly basis for use of the services you have selected. There are also circumstances under which you are billed for repairing those connections which you use. Whether repairs are billed or not is covered in the Repair Responsibilities section of our website. On this page, we explain how and when you are billed.
Communications Services does not directly bill any of our customers. Billing to faculty and staff customers for our services is provided by recharges to the UCSB General Ledger system. Whenever we install a service for you, your department's administrative staff provides us with a University Account Number to recharge for any one-time and recurring charges for that service. Different Account Numbers can be recharged for different services (e.g., your telephone line can be recharged to one Account Number, and your long distance calls can be charged to a different Account Number). Your administrative staff can change the University Account Numbers we recharge at any time, and subsequent recharges (starting with the next monthly bill) will be applied to the new Account Number. However, we cannot change the Account Number to which a previous month's activity has already been recharged.
During the last week of each month, our recharge system collects all of the charges applicable for each of the services we provide, totals the charges by University Account Number and Object Code and generates a data file that is sent to Accounting Services & Controls to recharge each Account Number using the General Ledger system. Our system also produces a detailed recharge statement that lists of all of the services and telephone calls, by Account Number, and this statement is provided to your administrative staff via campus mail. This monthly statement is not an invoice or a request for payment. Payment is automatic whenever the data file we send to Accounting Services & Controls is processed by their staff. We normally mail out this recharge statement in the first week of each month.
All of the services we provide are recharged "in arrears." That is, you do not pay for any service until after you have used it. This differs from most telephone and cable television companies, which require you to pay one month in advance. Our recharges will also include any charges we receive from other telephone carriers (e.g., AT&T, Qwest) for services that have been provided to you. Examples of these types of services are directory information, telegrams, collect calls, and operator services. Since it may take these telephone carriers weeks or months to send these charges to us, and we won't recharge them until our next billing cycle, these charges may be for services they provided to you far in the past.
Because we send out recharge statements only once per month, and you may have questions about telephone calls you made last week, yesterday or even ten minutes ago, we provide access to all of the billing data associated with your account via an online system called BORIS. BORIS allows our customers to do a variety of things: look at telephone and television charges for which they have already received billing statements, calculate the calling rates for calls they wish to make, look at a close approximation of current telephone and television charges that will appear on their next billing statement, and access their Trouble Ticket (request for repair) and Work Order (request for installation or change) records.
Our Customer Service section is happy to answer any questions you have about the monthly statement of your service activity that we send you. You can reach us at extension 8700.
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