Announcing a new MSIS Billing Service - Hamilton!

by Michael Warden and Lyn Victorio

MSIS is rolling out a new monthly Billing Service that allows for an improved experience for customers who we charge for MSIS services.

Customers are often not aware of the details of what we are charging them annually.

Historically MSIS billing happened through Service Unit Billing once a year, which only shows up on a units statement of activities and has to be manually checked to know they are paying for anything. Customers have not been able to follow-up on those charges in an easy way to find out how much they are being charged or for what, and MSIS staff can’t look up this info easily. Many customers continue to pay for VM and Storage infrastructure though they may not use it anymore, which uses up our capacity and puts unnecessary financial burden on the department.

We are implementing standard monthly invoices and aligned support processes to improve their experience.

As an improvement, we are now billing monthly and sending out invoices electronically that detail what customers are being charged. We are using Zoho Invoice and Rundeck to run our monthly process for VM and Storage services. A/V and M3 billing use Schedulon and Shortbill to support billing. The MSIS invoices detail the services they are using and allow them to call the Service Desk to ask questions. In our first tests of this system, many customers have already started to respond that they were unaware of the billing and wanted to make changes.

We are also able to do invoices for one-time purchases and pass through costs, coordinated by our Service Operations Specialists.

We can also now do one-time invoices - available to Service Managers to coordinate a more professional looking record of their costs. If you have questions on the invoicing or how to get things set up, please put in a ticket to PIM. If you would like to generate a one-time invoice, please put in a ticket to PIM who can help to coordinate your requests.

For a fun introduction, check out this video introducing Hamilton: https://voice.adobe.com/a/BaGG4/ 

Thank you to everyone involved in making this happen, especially Lyn for her tireless work to see this through!!