Estimate Meter Reads

This contract has a black meter and a colour meter. No minimum volume. The contract allows estimates to be calculated against this contract. Unders stock is used to track any estimated billing. The contract had a previous actual black and colour read of 45,000 and 16,000 respectively.

Meter Setup

v4.3 style only

Only v4.3 style contracts allow entering opening balances. v4.4 and above enter start reads via meter billing.

Opening Balance

If there is a second estimated read of 5,000 black pages and 900 colour pages, that is entered in the Billing Meter Read screen (v4.3 style shown here).

This will produce a job similar to the following:

The current meter counts on the contract setup would look similar to:

If the following month actual reads of 57,000 black and 17,400 colour are received, so enter it via the Billing Meter Read screen.

Jim2 will produce a job similar to the following:

Whereby the actual black count is only 3,000 higher than previously estimated, so that is the net number charged to the customer. The unders are clawed back, and the actual standard page count is increased. The actual colour read still has not reached the amount previously estimated, so the entire amount for colour has been clawed back.

Looking at the black meter, it no longer has any unders to clawback, and its entire meter is a standard meter count. The colour meter still has 300 unders pages that will be clawed back the next time it is billed.

This allows Jim2 to keep track of actual page counts, even if previous estimated billing reads turned out to be too high.