Billing systems


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Billing Systems
	Any business that buys and sells must have an accurate and reliable billing system. The survival of a business depends on customers paying their bills for goods or services. Bills must be presented on time and be accurate. Annoyed customers will take their business elsewhere. Orders may be received online from a transactional website. Each order will be placed on a transaction file. Payments received will also be placed on the transaction file. A billing system is an example of a batch processing system. A billing system must... keep records of all goods or services bought by customers keep accurate records of customer details produce accurate bills produce statements of business transactions for each customer process payments received keep accurate accounts
	Input : A database (master file) of all customer accounts, storing fields such as CustomerID, CustomerName, PaymentsDue, PaymentsMade... Transaction file - a smaller file of recent transactions, storing fields such as TransactionID, TransactionType, Date, ItemBought, Amount... Validation checks must be made on all data when the data is input.
	Processing : The transaction file will need to be sorted into the same order as the master file. The master file is updated from the transaction file.
	Output : Bills (invoices) will be printed and sent to customers. Reports (such as account reports, customer statements) will be printed.