Colleagues,
We want to share with you the very encouraging results regarding our second parallel billing run with our new bIT recharge billing application.
What was the outcome of the March billing cycle run on April 1, 2024?
As with February’s recharge billing, the March billing cycle was run in parallel on both our existing recharge system and the new one. We made another significant step in the right direction: as you may remember, the direct comparison between both billing outputs for February showed a difference of $5k on +$2.3M total recharge. The March billing outputs reduced that difference more than 10-fold, to a difference of a couple of hundred dollars.
Similar to February, the output files sent to BFS and CalAnswers are from our current recharge system, so the very minor discrepancy has not impacted your department’s bIT recharge in any way.
What’s next for the April billing cycle that will run on May 1, 2024?
We will run another parallel billing cycle, and if the results are near-equivalent in both systems, we will send the billing output from our new application to campus systems.
Also as before, there will be no impact on your bIT recharges, as we will still have our original output feed available to revert to if needed. There are no changes to how you access this information in BFS. In CalAnswers, you will no longer see call detail records in the ‘Call Usage’ section. For simplification purposes, these charges will be included in the One-Time charges section.
Next Steps & Contact
With each billing cycle, we will troubleshoot and improve the accuracy of our new system until we are ready for a seamless transition to the new application.
Additionally, we are working on improvements to the Funding change page and Subscriber change page that many of you use. Over the next few months, we will begin migrating historical data into the new recharge system. Please keep an eye out for our next communication and check out our 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