How Resident Billing works

Overview

Resident billing in Maica is automated. Each fee a resident pays, such as the Basic Daily Fee, a means tested fee, or an accommodation payment, is set up as a separate item on their Service Agreement. A billing engine then runs every day, works out what is owed for each item, and produces the resident's invoices. You configure the fees once, and the engine bills them on schedule for as long as they apply.

This article explains the billing cycle, how invoices are put together, and which parts of billing happen automatically versus the parts you do yourself.

Billing periods and the billing cycle

The billing engine is a scheduled process that runs automatically once a day. On each run it looks for every active fee item whose next billing date has arrived, and bills it.

For each item due, the engine:

1. Works out the billing period it is charging for, based on the item's frequency and whether it bills in advance or in arrears.

2. Calculates the charge from the daily rate and the number of days in the period, applying any rules that are specific to that fee type.

3. Checks the charge against any caps that apply (annual, lifetime, or duration limits).

4. Creates an invoice line for the charge.

5. Updates the running totals on the fee item and on the resident's funding record.

6. Moves the item's next billing date forward to the next cycle.

Fee items can be billed daily, weekly, or monthly, or as a one-off charge, and most residents have several items running side by side, for example a Basic Daily Fee item, a means tested fee item, and an accommodation item all billing in parallel.

The billing engine is general purpose. It does not have separate logic hard-coded for every fee; instead it reads the fee type on each item and applies the right rules from there. That is why setting the correct fee type when you configure an item matters. See Configuring Resident Fees (Fees Tab).

Leave does not change what is billed. No leave type suspends billing or reduces the days charged, and the engine does not read leave records when it bills. The resident is paying to hold their place, and the place is held whether they occupy it or not. See Fee Treatment during Leave.

Invoices and invoice lines

Each charge the engine calculates becomes an invoice line. Lines for the same resident are gathered under a single invoice for the open invoice period, so a resident receives one invoice covering all their fees rather than a separate invoice per fee.

Statements are produced separately, by a run someone in your organisation starts for a chosen period, usually once the month has finished and all of its charges have been raised. See Resident Monthly Statements.

Every line the billing engine creates is marked as coming from the billing engine. This makes it easy to tell automated charges apart from adjustments or manual corrections when you review a resident's account.

What happens automatically and what you do yourself

Most billing is hands-off, but some actions remain with your team by design.

Happens automatically	You do this yourself
The daily billing run, calculating and invoicing all due fee items	Setting up fee items and their rates on the Fees tab
Rolling each item's next billing date forward	Changing a rate when a resident's fees change
Applying caps during billing	Recording leave, which is needed for reporting and for Services Australia rather than for billing
Drawing eligible charges down against a lump sum deposit	Generating each period's monthly statements
	Monitoring events the engine does not track, such as the day-29 hospital leave fee reduction

An administrator can also trigger an extra billing run on demand from the Maica settings, in addition to the daily scheduled run. This is mainly used for testing or catch-up, and is described in the administration guide.

If a single fee item cannot be billed, the engine marks just that item as failed and records a log entry, then carries on with the rest. It does not stop the whole run. Your billing team can find failed items by filtering on the billing status and reviewing the logs.

A failed item stays out of billing until someone clears its billing status, so it does not resolve itself on the next run. Reviewing failures promptly matters: an item left failed is a fee that is not being charged.