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Introduction
Primarily for use in situations where you need to produce a telephone bill for a client or group of clients, for example in a business centre, a hospital, or other organisation with a front-of-house function. The result is a fully-fledged telephone bill - in the same style as one you'd expect to receive from a telephone company. See the section on customising reports for information about how change the complete look and feel of the bills you produce.
Running the report
On the Reports screen, either select Billing report and Run now or double-click on the Billing Report in the report list as show below:
The following screen will be displayed:
In order to run a report you need to tell TIM what you want to report on, and over what period, by selecting the criteria in the box as shown above. Sections with red headings are mandatory, blue headed sections are optional.
Billing Period
Select a time period over which calls made will be included in the bill, from the drop-down list as shown below.
The default period is Last Month. This means the last calendar month - NOT the last 30 or 31 days.
If you want to specify a period not shown in the list, select Custom Period from the list and then enter your Start and End dates and times manually into the boxes provided, as shown below:
Choose a site to report on
If your system is set-up to administer multiple sites, you have the option of selecting a particular site here. Select the blank line (or leave the box empty) to report on all of your sites.
 | NOTE: When using TIM Professional on more than one site, you will need to get a site license for each site logged. If you are logging more than one site, you may want to consider TIM Plus or TIM Enterprise, which, although more advanced, often work out more cost effective in a multi-site scenario. |
Who do you want to bill?
You can bill people in three ways:-
| Billing way | Description |
|---|---|
| Extension Group | Select the group of extensions you would like your bill to cover. A list of groups is automatically constructed from your extensions set-up. |
| Extension | Enter a single extension number of the person you would like to bill. |
| Account | If you want to produce a bill consisting of all chargeable calls made using a particular account code, enter the account code in the box. |
Adjust how the bill is calculated
You have two options available:
| Billing way | Description |
|---|---|
| Mark up on each call | You can add a percentage mark-up to each call. To do this, enter the percentage you would like to mark the call up by here. |
| Surcharge per call | You may want to have a surcharge on each call. A surcharge is a fixed amount that is added to the original cost of the call. |
| NOTE: Both a surcharge and a mark-up can be applied together. In this case, the surcharge is added after the mark-up is calculated, on order that the surcharge isn't marked up too. |
Include Operator-Assisted calls
By default, the bill includes all calls made from an extension regardless of whether or not the call was originally dialled by that extension, or by an operator on behalf of that extension. To exclude operator-assisted (or transferred outgoing) calls, deselect the check box provided.
Include Client's own LCR accesses
Used in the billing platform version to indicate that you would still like to bill for calls that didn't use your network.
How do you want the bill to look?
| Bill's look | Description |
|---|---|
| Detailed (itemised) bill | This option will give you a complete itemised list of each call made by the billing entity you selected. |
| Summary (cost only) bill | This option will give you a summary of each billing entity's calls rather than a completely itemised list. |
Creating the report
When you have selected your desired billing options, chosen a billing period, and are happy with your selections, simply click on the Run Now button.
The results
The header and footer of the bill can be completely customised, as described elsewhere in this manual. Assuming the standard installation, your bill should show the billing entity in the top-left corner, alongside your company logo in the top-right.
The header will also show the billing period including dates and times, followed again by the billing entity. If you allocated a friendly name to the report (during scheduling), this report name will also feature in the header.
Following the header, the summary of each billing entity is given, or in the case of an itemised bill, each individual call made by the billing entity is shown, with the date and time the call was started, the extension (and name) responsible for the call, the destination and dialled number, the duration of the call, and finally the cost including any surcharge and mark-up.
If the billing entity includes more than one extension, the bill is split up for each one enabling you to see at-a-glance which extension made which calls.