Notes from the 4/16/2010 Billing Working Group meeting

4/16/2010 at 10am in N42-286

Everyone was there except Chuck King, who was sick. 

Topic:  Establishing a Calendar for CSS Billing 

(PDF board notes are attached.  )

(“The List”, http://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/CSS/Billing was distributed as a handout in case we got to the third agenda item of vetting the list further.) 

1.       Update on Direct Billing via TNSC

a. Anna met with Jana on Wed 4/14 to prototype some transactions (14 or so, for one customer) to go through as trial transactions, to proof the technical ability and look for shortcomings in the process. 

b. Accolades from Anna for the directness and simplicity of the process.  Rarin’ to go!

c. But we need to keep to the discipline of seeing how well it behaves, and develop a trustable protocol that takes care of issues that may be raised by Finance, TLs, or DLCs.

d. ACTION: schedule a meeting about TNSC among the interested parties: Anne, Anna, Mark, Rob, Chris G.  Rob is out all next week; while Friday the 23d seems a natural date, perhaps it can be early the next week and Rob can attend.

e. Rashard will consider opting in (or not) when the prospects for the tool are more definite, so he won’t need to be in on the prototyping for now

2.Calendar of Billing, with Irina

a. Follows up on our desire from 3/19 to establish standardized due dates for Billing, to spread the load imposed on Quentin and have a definite calendar as part of a professional best practice.

b. Feeds in to the calendar of activities project that Irina is starting to work on…

c. With Irina’s help, we reviewed the calendar component of each team’s billing behavior. 

• Training: current practice is accumulate billables into an excel  JV file to send to finance by the 3^rd week of each month.
• DCAD: current practice is to accumulate billables in Quickbooks until the end of the quarter; issue invoices via email to clients; issue excel report from Quickbooks for Quentin to turn into a finished JV file, by the 4^th week of the 3^rd month of the quarter.   Quentin turns it around the same day generally.
• PC Service internal billings: for HW cases it is direct-billed through PMATs at the time of the transaction; PMATS queues it and posts it on its own schedule.   For SW/HW and SW cases, printed RT tickets are handed piecemeal to Quentin, who does them in a batch.
• VSLS: JV upload of billable RT tickets, once a month at the end of the month.
• MDS: Long-term SLAs billed quarterly at the end of the quarter, via a JV upload.  Short-term SLAs invoiced via a Word-doc receipt, and a monthly JV upload of accumulated charges, at the end of the month.

d. Outcomes:

• In establishing a calendar, the group wants to understand the whole process flow of steps in the financial process as part of the bigger picture into which their actions fit.
• Would like an email notification well in advance of the year-end close to make sure they get their billings in early enough to count in this fiscal year.  Perhaps similar to email ticklers Anne sends about other financial deadlines, like eDACCAs I suppose.
• Broader use of TNSC, if it comes to fruition,  promises to remove much of the prior concern about the billing calendar convergence on Quentin.  Transactions will entered as they happen by agents of the business, then the system will simply remember them until it is time to dispatch them in a batch process that Kelly does, typically on the 4^th business day before the end of the month.
• TNSC process steps need to be documented and understood for transparency about what is going on.   There will be a need for reporting of certain kinds as part of the CSS process:

• - review the details of pending transactions through some report
• - review the details of product definitions in the system, in case target GLs need to be changed, say, and to review default line item text templates.
• ACTION: circulate a proposed calendar for different teams to prepare the statements for the month and begin to transfer funds.  Include in that calendar the other process steps of internal review that we discuss above. 

e. Other Comments to Be Sure We Remember and perhaps add to The List

i. Jeff summarized some of our team goals as
- Fewer Tools,
- Ease the Load on Quentin,
- Build More After-the-Fact Business Analysis capability

ii. Chris and others said we need to be able to capture the item detail for analysis, and roll it up for billing.  Don’t have “a tool” that can do that.  But we might be able to get there with pieces of other tools used more effectively (like custom fields in RT feeding the warehouse, where Brio or something else can pull stuff out and roll it up)

iii. Chris said that Getting Backup to the people that need it before they ask for it is an important objective.  Shouldn’t pretty much everyone always get a receipt, esp. if it’s electronic? 

iv. Chris said that Clients on the financial reconciliation side of the DLC need some help understanding the DTR Line Item texts of charges that look very similar and may appear duplicate in fact, but really were for different transactions even if by the same person; the RT number may not be indicative enough. 

Next Meeting

i. Follow up on the calendar – do we have agreement?

ii. Work on DTR Line Item Text standard – can we optimize for cross-IS&T consistency and powerful content? 

(Agenda as originally planned)

4/16/2010 CSS Billing Working Group

10:00 am in N42-286

Proposed Agenda:  "CSS Cohesion, Transparency, Collective Effort"

• Recap -- where we are in what we're working on. 

1. 1. Group Cohesion as the Billing Working Group -- regular meetings, shared perspective on our common problems, respect for our individually different problems.  We are the group and we can solve our problems. 
   2. PMATS -- asked SAIS to change the DTR text to be more useful
   3. Direct Billing via TNSC-for-CSS -- evaluating whether Direct Billing in this way should be in our toolkit, and if so, start prototyping how. 

• Operational Standards -- Group Process Calendar
  • with Irina Vainstock facilitating, as part of CSS HQ's Process Calendar initiative
  • Schedule billing windows per line of business.  Let's hammer out a consistent production schedule – how often and precisely when in the month/quarter will we commit to processing the existing billables?  Goals include smoothing out volume of JV files sent to finance.
• Other Process Improvement Initiatives
  • Remind ourselves of things on The List -- should we take any off?
  • Brainstorm things not on the list -- what might we want to add?
  • Prioritize things that are on the new list
  • Spawn child processes to swarm things forward -- do people want to sign up to work on certain things?