While bill totals are usually straightforward there can be edge cases and unusual situations. This topic will highlight some of the more common questions that come up.

Bills and Customer History

Bills from Trash Flow will always reflect the charges that show up on the customer's financial history tab. Printing or emailing any kind of bill—a postcard, an invoice, a statement—will never add to or change how much money the customer owes. Those charges can come from a number of different sources including:

• Assessing charges for regular service (monthly, quarterly, or otherwise);
• Charging all the stops along a given route for pickup;
• Making a container charge from the customer Boxes tab;
• Financially completing a work order;
• Making a one-time charge from the customer Charge tab;
• Entering a scalehouse ticket with TipTicket;
• Making a one-time charge to an entire bill group, often for a franchise fee;
• Assessing a late fee or finance charge;
• Taxes added to one of the charge types above; and
• Surcharges (often a fuel surcharge or environmental fee) added to one of those charge types.

Rounding

Trash Flow uses a common technique called "banker's rounding" when it has to round off an amount. An amount from .1 to .4 will round down; an amount from .6 to .9 will round up. When a figure ends in .5 it will be rounded to the nearest even number. An example: suppose you charge $69.50 per ton and a customer brings in 1.91 tons of material. The total is technically $132.745, but you can't bill people for fractions of a cent. Trash Flow would round that down to $132.74. However, if a charge worked out to $132.855 it would be rounded up to $132.86.

Taxes

When Trash Flow is set to charge taxes it adds those taxes individually to each charge, but sums the tax total on the bill. That distinction can be important because some customers expect the tax to be a certain percentage of the bill total: e.g., if they are charged $100 plus 7% tax, they assume the bill will be for $107.00 even. That's not necessarily the case, though—if that $100 comes from a mix of different charges the bill might be for $106.99 or $107.01. This isn't a bug; it's how the software is intended to work, adding the tax to every individual charge.