Utilities: the counter, IoT reads, bills, notices, requests and the portal

Buttons drawn only for the grant they need, the company’s business day at the counter, hourly IoT thresholds, preview numbers reused, US-format bill PDFs, one notice a run, what a resident wrote and the premise it matches, portal dates and the autopay message, firmware and alarm Acknowledge, and CRM › Activities.

The counter

• A toolbar or row button is drawn only for somebody who holds the grant it needs: a cashier no longer sees Record a mailed payment.
• Cash sessions and receipts fall on the company’s business day in its own time zone, not the server’s.
• Cashiering refreshes the account search after money is taken.

Reads from IoT meters

• Use is worked out per day over the real interval between reads, and the high and low thresholds are widened for reads more often than daily, so hourly reads are not flagged as exceptions.
• Leak (high) intervals are left out of the account’s usual use, and an hour with no read is not a zero.
• IoT Devices shows each device’s Firmware.
• Device Alarms has Acknowledge (with a note) and shows who acknowledged and who cleared an alarm. Completing the service order no longer marks the alarm acknowledged.
• The dashboard leaves reads waiting for a re-read off open exceptions.

Bills and notices

• A bill run reuses the numbers of superseded previews, so previewing again does not leave gaps.
• The bill PDF and bill e-mails use the company’s date and money format — a US company’s bill reads as a US bill.
• Run collections sends one notice level per bill per run: past-due first, then final on a later run.

Customer requests

• Customer Requests show What they wrote, the Matched premise and the Review note.
• An address the resident typed is matched to a premise and offered. Premises at this address lists the likely ones, nearest house number first; Match to a premise sets it.

The resident portal

My utility account shows dates in the company’s format and a plain-words autopay message.

CRM › Activities

CRM › Customers › Relationships › Activities is a designed list and form for the calls, e-mails, meetings and notes logged against a customer, a contact or an opportunity, with Put in my calendar on each row.