Re: Invoice release automatisation

we have an automated solution to run batch billing each night. version 6.0.04.

it's been so long that i forget all of the details, but it works pretty well. 
there is a technical tricky that you have to do to get the process to work 
properly.

we run the billing job under ROBOT, but you could do the same thing with your 
own CL or job scheduler. the key problem is that BIL550 is the billing 
selection program and BIL551 is the actual billing program. and BIL550 submits 
a separate job that contains the BIL551 program and this is where the problems 
come from.

as i remember we submit a batch job. the first thing that it does is to call 
BIL550. we select the invoices that we want to produce be using the billing 
selection flag. one of the parameters that you pass to BIL550 is the billing 
selection flag that you want to select from BBH/BBL. what BIL550 does is to 
scan the BBH/BBL records and 'tag' any records that it finds that match the 
selection criteria. if i remember it 'tags the BBH/BBL record by updated the 
job id, user, id, or workstation id into each BBH/BBL record that it selects. 
this indicates that this BBH/BBL record is now owned by a billing process. (the 
billing process is designed so that it can support multiple users running 
billing at the same time so it is necessary to 'tag' each record to the person 
that is selecting it.) when BIL550 end it submits a second batch job that calls 
BIL551 and which wants to process the records that BIL550 tagged. we had 
problems getting this to work, i'm not sure just what the problem was, it might 
have had to do with routing of the output forms or it might have been that the 
BIL550 was passing a parameter to BIL551 that needed to change because they 
were two different jobs. or maybe BIL551 was retrieving a parameter ( such as 
workstation ID, user, id, or job number) that was different than the one that 
BIL550 used to tag  the BBH/BBL records. anyway BIL551 would run but would not 
find any records to bill.

to get around this we changed the job description so that BIL550 submits its 
BIL551 to a dummy job queue. it goes to this job queue and does not run. 
instead we coded a call to BIL551 immediately after the call to BIL550. this 
causes BIL551 to run in the same batch job as BIL550 and it uses all of the 
same parameters. thus it is able to find the BBH/BBL records that BIL550 tagged 
for it. i think there is also an option in BIL550 to say whether you want it to 
run in batch or interactive. again , if i remember, we set this to interactive, 
even though it runs in a batch job. this had something to do with the parameter 
passing between BIL550 and BIL551.

we run several iterations of the BIL550 / BIL551 combination in the batch job, 
each time selecting different invoices based upon the billing selection flag, 
this allows us to route certain invoices to one printer and other to another 
printer. at the end of the job we then issue a command to clear of the BIL551 
jobs that were submitted to the dummy job queue. it works, it required no 
changes to any SSA programs. i'll be glad to share more info if need be.

chick doe
barton instrument systems

>>> P.Deveau@bluelineinc.com 01/15/02 07:32AM >>>
I wrote a RPG program to submit the BIL500 program automatically. My
program generated all the parameters needed to call the BIL500B. The
BIL500B program update the BBL and BBH file correctly, but the BIL501B seem
not run and any other job are submitted.
Is somebody have automated the invoice release?
Are they another way to skip the BIL501D1-01 screen?


I'm on V6.1.01 mixed mode.


Pierre Deveau

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