AMI billing export

The AMI billing export (ABE) process calculates and exports billing determinants from readings data to support customer billing for residential, small commercial, and large commercial accounts.

AMI billing export consists of the following independent but sequential processes:

  1. IEE receives the billing request from the external billing system, validates that the requests are properly formed and can be processed, and queries the requests for further processing.

  2. If at any point IEE cannot fulfill a request item, the item generates an exception and appears in the AMI billing export queue.

  3. The bill determinant calculation processor calculates billing determinants for requests successfully loaded by the import process. The calculation process also evaluates the quality of the readings data used in the calculations.

  4. (Optional) Administrators can configure the export data to use the Cycle ID stored with the service point, instead of the Cycle ID normally used by the AMI billing export process.

  5. (Optional) IEE administrators can configure IEE to stop generating gap fill interrogation requests for the meter and time period to prevent IEE from replacing readings used for billing. (IEE cannot terminate gap fill interrogation requests already in process.)

  6. (Optional) Utilities can customize a series of checks to validate the billing determinants before exporting data to the external billing system. Contact Itron for more information about configuring billing validation in IEE.

  7. The export processor exports the readings and bill determinants to the external billing system. It also creates export history reading group records that can be used to track the version of data used for determinant calculation.

  8. (Optional) IEE administrators can enable billing confirmation. When the external system generates customer bills, it can send a confirmation back to IEE. IEE updates the "billed" status to "billed-confirmed."

Billing determinant calculations can be based on aggregated interval reading data or simple register readings. This aggregated data can come from static or dynamic service point groups. The service points in the static group can be explicitly defined in the formula used to generate the data, or they can be selected dynamically based on their attributes and properties specified in the formula. For more details, see UCE and dynamic aggregation.

The AMI billing export design also supports off-cycle requests such as move-in/move-out and re-bill.

Management and control of the AMI billing export process for expected data volumes is very important. Frequent user intervention is impractical at these volumes. Proper configuration, setup, and monitoring is needed to minimize problems and maintain the high-speed flow of data.

The AMI Billing Export user interface includes the billing export queue, diagnostics and troubleshooting tools, and exception trend graphing.

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