Group Billing
- Robert Lenk
- Chris Barrett
- Sarah Marciniak
About group billing
To apply charges to student bills or calculate refunds you must run group billing. The process also updates your general ledger. Each time you run group billing a new batch is created to allowing multiple people to run group billing simultaneously and for you to track posted charges and adjustments.
Even if you use real-time billing, you must run group billing to release the temporary charges, apply the permanent charges and update your general ledger.
Group billing relies on the billing rules that can charge tuition, fees, tuition insurance, health insurance or housing. To connect these rules to individual students, Campus Cafe looks primarily at the student’s session data for the semester being billed. Students without session data won’t be billed and will appear as an error.
Group billing also looks at student’s individual course enrollments. If you’ve set a site, Campus Cafe uses this site and not the site on the course to assess course fees.
Group billing will also look at Student Codes if you wish to bill by student type.
Prerequisites
Create billing rules. A rule must exist for every academic major to be billed.
Create a registration control record for the semester to bill.
Students have session data, including a billing site.
Your bill batch must be empty.
Required permissions
Module | Number | Description |
|---|---|---|
Student Financials | 1135 | Run group billing |
Run group billing
Go to Financials > Group Billing.
Select a Billing Semester. Campus Cafe will assess charges and refunds for this academic period.
If your institution bills freshmen before they register, you may wish to select Include Unenrolled Freshmen. Un-enrolled Freshmen are 1) Students with an admissions entering semester equal to the billing semester and 2) students with an admissions progress code of P (deposited) and 3) the student's admissions part-time code is blank.
If you wish to bill students who were registered for a past semester but aren’t registered for the billing semester, you may wish to select the previous semester in Include Unenrolled From Semester. This may be helpful if you assume that everyone registered for a previous semester will progress to the billing semester but haven’t registered yet. Students will be billed the number of credits enter in Minimum credits F/T.
If you wish to bill only students at certain sites, select Use Site Filter and in Sites to Bill enter the billing site numbers to bill separated by commas. For example, 02, 05 would bill sites 1 and 5. You may use site filter in conjunction with class level filter.
If you wish to bill only students of certain class levels (e.g. seniors), select Use Class Level Filter and in Class Levels to Bill enter the class level codes to bill separated by commas. For example, 02, 05 would bill sites 1 and 5. You may use site filter in conjunction with site filter. Class level codes are defined using STParm SMLNCD.
If you wish to bill only students of a certain type, in Limit to Student Type select the type of student. Type of student is set on Student Codes.
Click Process Group Billing.
When billing completes, a summary of the charges to transfer to your batch for posting appears.
Review Output Error Messages for students Campus Cafe wasn’t able to bill. You may wish to correct these errors and run group billing again.
If you’re happy with the results, click Transfer. This sends the charges and refunds to bill batch for posting. You must post the batch for the charges to apply to student bills and your general ledger.
Understanding errors
If the Process Output Messages box shows students, this typically means there is a disconnect between the students being billed and the rules. Put another way, these errors imply that a student is in a billing site or major without a corresponding billing rule.
The numbers preceding the colon indicate the student's ID number. Following the ID number is the student's site. The last segment of text is the error.
MTX:NO_MATRIX means Campus Cafe couldn’t find a billing rule associated with the student's major concentration and/or billing site.
MTX: HOUSE MTX means Campus Cafe couldn’t find a housing assignment on the term’s session data row for a “R-Resident” marked student. When a student is marked as a resident student, Campus Cafe expects a housing assignment to be listed to bill the student properly.
Missing SessionData(HOHIST) means the student doesn’t have session data for the term of enrollment.
