Setting Up a New Customer for Billing and Training a New Hire

The Starting Point

The company needed to set up a new business customer for billing, and several items were still outstanding. There was no signed proforma invoice yet, no card authorization form, no complete provisioning document with verified service addresses for the customer's two sites, and no customer ID from accounting.

At the same time, a new accounting hire was joining the team and needed to learn how a customer gets set up for billing.

What I Did

I wrote the process down step by step in the team's training channel. It covers what accounting needs before a customer ID can be issued, where each document is kept, how to check addresses before the card billing system rejects them, and the handoffs from accounting to invoicing to payment.

Then I used this customer as the live example. The new hire attached the signed documents to the accounting task, posted the request and assigned it, and I checked the work. Accounting issued the customer ID the same day. I added it to the provisioning document and the support ticket, and the task moved on to creating the first invoice.

Along the way I found three errors on the proforma invoice: a cancelled fax line that was still being billed, a mistyped toll-free number, and ported numbers billed as new numbers. I flagged them to management for a decision before they could go onto the first invoice.

I also pointed out that the card details were stored in full in the task, and recommended removing them once the card had been charged.

What Went Into the Work

Why It Matters

A line billed after it was cancelled, a wrong number, or ported numbers charged as new ones would each have come back as a query and a correction. Catching them on the proforma meant management could decide before the customer ever saw them.

Training on a real customer meant the new hire learned the process with the actual documents, systems and people involved, and the customer was set up at the same time. The written steps stay in the training channel for the next person.

Full card details sitting in a task are a risk the team does not need to carry once the charge has gone through, so raising it early made it easy to fix.

Tools and Skills Used

Billing setup, invoice review, process documentation, training and reviewing a new team member's work, cross-team handoffs, and spotting sensitive data that should not be kept.

Who This Is For

This case study is worth reading if you are:

• ●Setting up new customers across sales, accounting and billing, with documents that tend to go missing along the way.
• ●Bringing on a new hire and wanting them trained on real work, with someone checking it.
• ●Finding billing errors only after the customer has queried the invoice.