Original posting: 4/11/05
Communications Services has recently converted to a new version of its recharge billing software. There have been several changes which affect how charges appear on your monthly billing summaries.
Examples of the new statements are available:
Faculty and Staff: Understanding Your Communications Services Account Usage Report (pdf)
With our new statements, charges for an individual (referred to as a subscriber in our system) are now organized by the service with which they are associated. This means that when examining the section of the billing statement for an individual's telephone line, all charges (Monthly, Toll, Local, etc.) for the telephone service will be presented in one subsection of the statement. Charges for Voice Mail, Calling Card Calls, and Authorization Codes will all be found in separate individual subsections.
In addition to organizing the charges by service, the new version of our system allows us to better associate services with individual subscribers. Previously, if an individual had several telephone lines, a calling card, and multiple authorization codes, the charges for each of these services would have been assigned to separate subscribers in our system, and printed in separate sections of the billing summaries. This could make it difficult to determine the full set of services which were being used by an individual. Now, these multiple services can be combined under a single subscriber, and printed together in the summaries. We have attempted to consolidate the services for an individual wherever possible. If we were maintaining multiple subscriber records with the same name in the same department, we have merged those records together so that all services for that individual will now print together in the summary. We hope this will make it easier for departments to manage the services and charges associated with individuals.
As part of this change you will also notice the following:
- Previously, for Calling Cards, a "fictitious" number of the form 999-998-nnnn was printed on the statement instead of the card number. Now the card number will be printed, but for security reasons, the PIN will not be printed.
- For faculty and staff Authorization Codes, the "fictitious" number printed on your statement has also changed. While the Authorization Code itself has not changed, and for security reasons will still not be printed on the statement, the number printed has changed from 999-999-nnnn to AUTH-nnnn.
- Work order and trouble ticket charges for a particular service will now be found with the associated subscriber and service. For example, if a telephone trouble report is opened for 893-9999, any charges for that trouble ticket will be in the statement in the section for 893-9999. Work order charges not associated with a particular service (for example, departmental wiring) will continue to be found in their own section for each account.
- Charges for workorders and trouble tickets will now be listed in detail. Individual parts and labor time entries will now be shown on the billing summary.
- Statements to departments are distributed via campus mail according to the 4-character department code associated with an account. As part of our conversion, the "owner" department codes were resynchronized with the General Ledger. This may result in a small number of statements being distributed differently. Please contact us if you need the routing changed.
We appreciate your patience during this transition to a new system. If you have any questions about your new statements, please send email to help@commserv.ucsb.edu, or call extension 8700.
Also see: What's new with BORIS Online Account Access.
BAM
