Get early Testing Wins in your Billing Migration Project

Kicking off a billing system migration project is exciting.  For those of us in the utilities billing industry, we grow fond of the billing system we know as we become accustomed to its quirks and how it likes to do things.  Typically utilities will hang on to billing systems as long as possible - generally a minimum of 10 years but can go beyond 25 years in some cases.  

So the opportunity to move your customer base onto a new system does not come along very often!  This does create some challenges though - most of your staff won’t have executed a billing system migration before.  So in this blog I’m going to outline one of the best ways I’ve found to ensure clarity for your Billing Sanity Testing (BST).  I’ve set this out in steps and please keep in mind that it is never too early in your migration project to this - I strongly suggest you give it a go as part of your testing strategy!  

Step 1. Examine your customer base and identify the tariffs or products that will give you around 80% coverage of all your customers.  The 80% coverage is a rule of thumb I use to start with but you should seek guidance from your executive stakeholders on the coverage that they want tested - this value is highly dependent on their risk tolerance.  

Step 2. Setup a spreadsheet that includes the following for each of selected tariffs

1. Customer account for testing that utilises this tariff (you need one customer per unique tariff / product)
2. Unbilled metrics from your source data for this customer (it is easier if you can refresh your data from the same source to repeat the test)
3. Rates for this tariff
4. Formula to calculate the billed amount for this customer

Step 3. Following your next trial conversion, isolate your BST test accounts in the new billing system and create bills for them.

Step 4. Reconcile the details on the bills against the spreadsheet values and identify any issues.

Step 5. Raise the issues you find with your dev team - some may be due to the system (Vendor) while others could be due to data migration issues (Data team).

The above is a basic version of billing testing - for larger or more complex projects a more sophisticated and deeper Billing Confidence Test (BCT) will be necessary.  Regardless of the size of your project, I am sure your billing system migration project will find value from completing the above exercise - the earlier you do it, the more value you will create from the exercise.  

I hope you have found this article useful.  I will be publishing more articles and free tools to support utilities migration projects, so feel free to drop me a line with any feedback.  

Wishing you and your family a fantastic Christmas and look forward to a successful 2020!