Charge Record

A Charge Record is the result of billing: one line saying that a specific Asset was charged a specific amount, to a specific place, for a specific period. It is the record you look at when someone asks why am I being charged for this.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Overview
• Why Values Are Frozen
• Where the Charge Landed
• Corrections and Overrides
• Showback and Active
• Related Articles

Overview

A Charge Record is created by a Billing Run. One record is written per Asset, per Billing Rule, per billing period – so an Asset covered by two Rules produces two records for the same month.

Why Values Are Frozen

A Charge Record does not look up the price when you open it. It stores the values that applied at the moment the run happened:

• Price
  • The amount the Rule charged at that time.

• Currency
  • The currency the Rule used at that time.

• Target type
  • Which of the seven targets the Rule used to find the Cost Center.

This is what makes past billing defensible. Raising the price on a Rule changes future runs only – records already written keep the amount that was actually charged. A charge from March still shows the March price, even if the Rule has been changed three times since.

Where the Charge Landed

A record stores both the destination and how it was reached:

• Charged to
  • The Cost Center, Location or Company the amount was assigned to.

• Source
  • Which record actually supplied that Cost Center – a User, a Location or a Company.

The source is the answer to why here? A laptop charged to the Sales cost centre because the User it is assigned to belongs to Sales looks identical, on the surface, to one charged because its Location belongs to Sales. The source field tells the two apart without guesswork.

Corrections and Overrides

A Charge Record can be corrected after the run. Rather than editing the original amount away, the correction is recorded alongside it:

• Price override
  • The corrected amount. The original price stays visible.

• Modified by
  • Who made the correction.

• Reason
  • Why it was corrected.

• Notes
  • Free text for anything else worth recording.

Because a Charge Record carries its own who-and-why, corrections are traceable inside the record itself – which is why charges are not additionally tracked in Asset History.

Showback and Active

Two flags decide whether a record counts towards real money:

• Showback – the charge is shown but not billed. It appears in My Billing and is excluded from the totals.
• Active – an inactive record is kept for the audit trail but left out of the figures.

Related Articles

• Billing Run – what creates Charge Records.
• Billing Rule – price, currency and target.
• Cost Center – the seven ways an Asset finds one.
• My Billing – how managers see these charges.