Billing Cycle Site

The billing cycle site guides a unit fiscal specialist through the process of generating invoices from UW CORAL billing data. The maps shown below describe how data flows through the system at each step, and they are also shown on the site as you progress through the billing cycle.

At early stages of the process, it is expected that you may wish to generate reports to help you understand whether the data has errors that need to be corrected before you proceed. As long as you haven't sent out the invoices yet, this is no problem; just go back to the original data in CORAL, correct it and start the billing cycle over.

This document largely describes the linear process of preparing and posting invoices to Workday for the first time each month; but see also the section on Corrections at the end of the document.

At later stages of the billing process, you may wish to skip steps. You can use the links at the top of the page to skip directly to any of the steps, as long as you have passed the initialization step (step 0).

Step 0. Initialize

All UW CORAL billing takes place in the context of a given lab and a given month. At the first step, you select the lab, month and year of interest.

Step 1. Upload CAAMS

If the lab in question uses CAAMS data in its billing, upload the CAAMS data using this page. If it doesn't, skip it.

At the time of this writing, no labs upload CAAMS data. This step will likely be removed in a future version of UW CORAL.

Step 2. Update Cache

Billing should always be done from the most up-to-date version of CORAL's billing records. Updating the cache at this step is equivalent to loading the data in CORAL's Billing>Full tab.

Step 3. Unofficial Reports

Now you have up to date billing records that are ready to turn into invoices, but it is expected that you might want to review them first, using a summary report. Several report formats are available. Choose the one you like and press Go to download and review it. If you find errors, correct them in Coral, using either the Billing tabs or the Activity tabs, then go back to step 2.

Step 4. Generate Invoices

At this point, you are ready to generate invoices. The summary shows how many unofficial (unfinalized) invoices exist for the selected month as well as how many finalized invoices. You can generate unofficial invoices en masse for review, or if you prefer, use the other button to generate a month's worth of finalized invoices. Generating invoices does not send them anywhere, but they do immediately become available on the user invoice site.

Important: Generally speaking, you should only use the Generate New Official Invoices button once every billing cycle. If you have made corrections to an account's activity and wish to generate a new official invoice for that account, use Regenerate Tentative Invoices in this step and finalize the invoice of interest at the next step.

Step 5. Finalize Invoices

The invoice list at this step is very similar to the search results on the user invoice site.

The "Show which invoices" setting controls which versions of invoices are shown. The default setting, "best available", displays only the highest-numbered revision of a given invoice. "official only" shows only the highest-numbered positive revision. "all versions", as the name implies, shows all versions, including tentative "revision 0" invoices.

To the right of each invoice listed is a link that allows viewing the text of the invoice as it appears to users. The link is titled "View" or "View to Finalize" depending on whether this invoice is an official invoice or a tentative, revision-0 invoice. In the latter case, the popup dialog will also include a Finalize button that allows the promotion of that individual invoice to an official invoice.

Step 6. Finalized Reports

The process of finalizing invoices also generates finalized billing records, from which reports can be generated analogous to what we did in step 3. If you've been following the steps from step 0 for the first time this month, the reports from step 3 and step 6 will be the same; but subsequent revisions to the activity or user records can cause the unfinalized records to change. Finalized records, by contrast, only change when an invoice is finalized.

Step 7. Retrieve Invoices

This step displays another, very similar list to that shown in step 5 or on the user invoice site. The two buttons at the top of the display allow you to download all invoices as a single PDF document, for your records.

The rightmost column contains a link for every invoice to download that invoice in PDF format, for printing or manual emailing.

Step 8. Retrieve Summaries

In the past, we used summary files to submit ISDs and external billing. While these summaries are still available, they are not expected to be useful. This step will likely be removed in a future version of UW CORAL.

Step 9. Upload to Workday

The last step of the billing cycle is to upload ISDs to Workday for internal billing. Each internal invoice has a specific status vis-a-vis its upload to Workday, and only invoices in certain status may be uploaded. The meaning of each status is as follows:

The Refresh button refreshes the list of available invoices and their status.

Invoices that are in Ready, Error or Retraction Error state may be submitted to Workday for processing. Usually, an error state indicates that something is wrong with the transaction, though it can also mean that Workday or SWIFT is down for maintenance. Regardless of the status, you can click on the status link to see the details of the transaction sent to SWIFT and, below that, the result "context", including errors if any.

If you are having a hard time getting any invoices to succeed, or if retractions always fail, the "context" contains the necessary information for a Workday expert to diagnose the problem.

Correcting Errors After Billing Cycle

Over the course of time, it will inevitably happen that you will need to refund some or all of an ISD that has already posted, or transfer an ISD to a different budget. When this need arises, the overall procedure is as follows:

1. Open the Billing > Cycle tab and fill in step 0.
2. Click on the Upload to Workday link to skip to step 9.
3. Use the Retract button next to the submitted invoice to retract that invoice.
4. Wait a few minutes, pressing the Refresh button until the status changes to Retraction Success. If the original ISD cannot be retracted, you will need to make the changes manually in Workday.
5. Correct the issue in UW CORAL using the Billing or Activity tabs as appropriate.
6. Generate a new tentative invoice using steps 0, 2 and 4 of the billing cycle.
7. Select the individual invoice at step 5 and finalize it.
8. Skip to step 9. The new official invoice will appear in the list in status Ready. Press Upload to upload it.
9. Wait a few minutes, pressing the Refresh button until the status changes to Success.

Please note that if your correction involves more than one Account, for example if you are transferring charges between two Accounts, you will need to retract and resubmit invoices for both Accounts.