You can now specify 'Run Provisional Bill separately for every Billing Period' under 'Edit->Meter Account' (you must first click 'show more options' for the option to be exposed).
Previously, when you ran a Provisional Bill over a long period, e.g. a year, the Billing Engine would take your specified time range as the Billing Period, with Fixed Charge and Maximum Demand only charged once over the entire range.
That is in fact unrealistic, because there would typically have been 12 bills in that period, each with its own MD and Fixed Charge.
Very often, the Tariff itself that the Bills are based on has been designed for a month period, and charging for less or more time would cause strange results. When more than a month, you'd charge them too little, and when less, you'd charge them too much. An example is if you bill someone that used a studio for a day's electricity according to a Maximum Demand tariff, they would pay a very large Maximum Demand charge. However, if you ask then a thirtieth of the Maximum Demand charge to bring it in line, you will not recover your own Maximum Demand charge to your utility at the end of the month.
So, if you specify this option, the Provisional Bill will never span a billing date. Instead, more than one bill will be run and presented on one bill (the entire time range is chopped up into consecutive billing periods).
The Billing Period can also be specified (just above this checkbox). This is in the same format as 'Automatic Read Interval' under 'Edit->Advanced Meter Settings', and the default is 'monthly', which means midnight morning on the 1st of every month.
(Check here for a description of this format)
The Billing Period is also very important for when you have enabled the Prepaid Facility for Smart Prepaid metering, since it automatically runs a provisional bill for the current billing period every time the meter calls in, in order to debit the customer's Ledger.
To be backwards compatible to all our existing customers, this is not the default option: it has to be specifically enabled. It also applies to Provisional Bills and other ad hoc financial reporting only, not to Formal Bills. We will implement other meter account options to enforce good formal billing based on the Billing Period in the near future.

This is a great feature, but two aspects might need some more thought :

1. The provisional bill that is generated with this setting enabled (both below the profile graph (if set) and under 'View provisional bill') is broken up nicely into sub-periods, but there is no sub-total for each sub-period. A sub-total per period would be a nice addition :-)
   
   
2. When comparing a P&P provisional bill to one generated by a supply authority, the one from the supply authority almost always has an 'odd' date period, eg 18th to 17th, not 1st to 31st. With the 'generate separate provisional bills' setting 'ON', P&P seems to regard such a period as two separate sub-periods (eg 18th to 31st and 1st to 17th), and  generates certain charges twice, eg a Demand charge for each sub-period and/or an Access charge per sub-period, which gives the wrong result. Is there a way around this ?
   One solution might be to allow the user to configure the actual billing date(s) for the meter account in the same way that financial year start and end dates can be configured.

See illustrative snippets below