The new Billing Process does not work through the Billing Wizard any more. The Billing Wizard had a few problems, and did not scale well, as far as the performance goes, and also as far as the business process goes.
The new functionality does not do so many pre-billing checks. It only checks that the data on the meter is Valid.*
It will refuse to run bills for meter accounts with insufficient data (not read up to date) or that does not have tariffs or meters defined, or that are invalid. You will have the option to run it for the ones that are OK, in which case it will create 2 sets: one with the meter accounts it ran, and one with the rejected meter accounts. You can then use the second set later if you have fixed the problems.
The pre-billing check can run in the background, which means it goes onto the Report Queue (Tools->ReportQueue); which you can refresh from time to time to see if the report has finished yet. The bill run itself will also go onto the Report Queue (unless, of course, they take less than 10 seconds to complete, in which case they are just displayed). So you don't even have to keep your browser open when doing these operations: they are running in the background, and you can pick them up later in the Report Queue screen.
You can open the reports in the Report Queue before they are done, in which case you will only see the portion of the HTML page that has already been generated. This includes the bill being checked and the bill being run, amongst others.
When the bill has run, at the bottom are links that takes you to the Variance Report or Maintain Bills. On these screens you can choose to publish and unpublish bills. These screens are also available on the Tools menu.
You will recognize the Variance Report from the old Billing Wizard. It compares the daily average of the new bill with the daily average of the last three months of the same account: on top is a box with the Currency comparisons, and on the bottom is a box with the Engineering unit comparisons.
On Maintain Bills, you can publish, un-publish, delete and view bills, per date and per meter account, one at a time or in bulk (or whatever ones you select in the multiple select listbox)
* You can see all possibly invalid meters in the Tools->ValidationScreen. From there you can navigate to various relevant places to investigate and possibly fix the problem.
When pnpscada thinks there might be something wrong with the data on a meter, it will log a software(S) event or an audit event against it.
Events logged on a meter can cause the meter to become Invalid. It will then show up on your Validation Screen, where you can manually validate it, which also create corresponding Fault Log entries with your name in it, which means you have an audit trail you can go back to when a problem occurs and you need to explain in a responsible fashion to a customer why his bill was wrong (wrong data equals a wrong bill). So, this cause the meter to appear on your Validation Screen.
There is a chance that you get too many spurious events, in which case you can go to the Meter Event Setup, and switch off the corresponding checkboxes, causing the unselected events not to invalidate the meter any more.
You can use Tools->BulkEdit (use Firefox) to set these checkboxes many meters at a time (define a different set per meter type, because their checkboxes are different, because the events they support are different). The Bulk Edit will also go into the Report Queue if it takes a long time.