Calculate billing determinants

External systems typically request the following types of billing determinants:

• Total consumption for the billing period

• Time of use (TOU) usage determinants

• Total consumption for multiple channels within the given service point

• Demand response consumption

The AMI Billing Export (ABE) process also supports many complex commercial and industrial billing determinant calculations.

Billing requests that import successfully automatically trigger the Calculate Determinant process. You do not need to schedule the Calculate Determinant process to run independently on a recurring schedule.

Billing requests that do not import successfully do not automatically advance to the Calculate Determinant step. Instead, a scheduled Billing Export Exception process executes periodically throughout the day in order to re-run requests through the previously failed step. Use the AMI billing export queue to manage requests that raise exceptions.

When the estimation process generates estimates, it scales those estimates using consumption recorded by the associated cumulative register channel where possible. Many utilities require IEE to inform the billing system of the number of estimated readings that were used to calculate each determinant and the number of estimated intervals that were not scaled using register consumption. The billing system can use counts to determine whether to consider the determinant an estimate.

Intervals that are estimated but not scaled using the register consumption channel are marked with the interval status ESTUNSCALED (estimation unscaled).