This article will cover the process for creating new billing books within the CHRC OneCouncil billing system - it is written from a Rates perspective, but this process may apply for other teams as well (Animals, Compliance, Sundry debtors etc)
If you're unsure about any of this, contact Corporate Applications and we can arrange a training session in a non-production environment so you can have confidence when you go to action this in our real-life production environment. 


The story so far


The billing system is the central system by which council can charge fees and levies, be they animal licences or rates notices or bin replacement fees or anything else!

The main component we're looking at today are our books. 

These books contain the levy charge calculations, discounts, rebates, capping calculations etc, that will need to be created, updated, and reviewed each EOFY (and in some circumstances, each new calendar year).



For Rates, by the end of the financial year, there will be 3 billing books:

  • 1 for rates (for the whole financial year) - "20XXRATES"
  • 1 for the first half of the financial year for water - "20XXWATER"
  • 1 for the second half of the financial year for water - "20XX2WATER"


Here is the process for creating a new book:

In this example we'll be doing the 20XXWATER book, but the process is the same for any billing book.

  1. There are (currently) 4 different roles that have access to the billing system. In each of them, you're looking for this function:

    This is the function that has our billing systems (CHRC currently has only 1: "CHRC")

  2. The below image is what you'll see within the "CHRC" billing system.
    1. Click on "Books"
    2. Use the search bar to find the latest book of the type you're creating
    3. Past books may appear in the results; consider using the "Effective" dates to help narrow your search. In this example (article written EOFY 2023) we're looking for the 2023WATER book, as we're looking to create a 2024WATER book. So that's the one we open.


  3. We don't want to change the current book, we want to create a new one for the next year, so we're going to open the secondary actions button, and click "Copy Book":



  4. We'll give our new book a name and description that fits the existing naming conventions, as well as appropriate "Effective" dates, and we want to copy everything:



    Once complete, you'll see this:


    Click "Done"

  5. You can now see we're in our new billing book. This will be the book our billing process will point to for levy charge calculations, discounts, etc. 
    We're now free to edit our levy charge calculations and anything else for the coming year, using the relevant tile on the left hand side. 



    If you have any questions about this process, please contact your Corporate Applications team member. :)