Finalizing the Recharge Billing Upgrade and One Time Charge Error - August/September 2024

Colleagues,

We are on the cusp of retiring our current billing system and fully transitioning our remaining back-end processes to our new bIT recharge billing application (into TelCat). Our goal is to conclude this transition without disrupting you, our recharge billing customers.

What was the outcome of the August billing cycles run on September 3?

• Due to human error, and not a shortcoming of the new recharge system, many one-time charges that were recharged in July erroneously recharged again on the August ledger.
  • I apologize for the rebilling of these July expenses. 
  • Services particularly affected by this recharge issue are UC Backup and cellular services.
  • These incorrect July charges appearing on the August ledger will be credited back on the September ledger.
  • We have made internal processing changes to ensure that this type of error does not occur again.
• Apart from this error, we were able to successfully generate bIT recharges and process the output files from our new application to campus systems.
• We are confident that we will be ready to move all recharge functionality to ServiceNow over the next two months. 

What will happen going forward?

• In the test environment, during the last weeks of September,  we will close out the remaining development efforts and shut down the processes in the old billing system. We will be testing and reviewing in the test environment to ensure everything is running as expected before turning off the old recharge system in production.
• Once testing is successful, we will fully transition to the new recharge billing application.
• After the September billing cycle on October 1, we will shut down the old billing system and have our new recharge billing application fully integrated with TelCat ServiceNow. All the processes that constitute the monthly recharge billing cycle will then be run in TelCat ServiceNow.

How will these changes affect our telcat customers?

• Your monthly recharge should not be affected by these changes.  Please continue to review your recharged bIT Services details in CalAnswers.

Next Steps & Contact

• As we complete this transition throughout September and October, we will continue to loop you in on our progress, achievements, and timeline
• Historical data will be migrated into the new recharge system once the application has moved to the Production environment. Data migration is scheduled to conclude by November.

Please watch for our next communication and check out our updated FAQ page.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at bitbill@berkeley.edu.

Thank you!

Darin Clarke
Billing Manager
Berkeley IT | Business Operations