Kavi® Billing is designed to work as part of a suite of web site applications, providing billing and receipts for a variety of different tools. Kavi Billing consolidates the billing history for an account into a single place, and centralizes an organization's methodology for accepting payment, creating bill IDs and other billing details.

Kavi Billing interacts most prominently with Kavi® Members and Kavi® Commerce. Details of how Kavi Billing works with these two applications follow.

Figure 4.1. How Kavi Billing Works with Other Applications

Kavi Members supplies the contact information and names for billing accounts. Billing accounts can be created automatically when companies and users are added to Kavi Members, or manually by a billing administrator. When contact information is updated in Kavi Members, the associated billing account is automatically updated to match these changes.

Kavi Commerce provides credit card collection services to Kavi Billing. When Kavi Commerce is installed, Kavi Billing can present account holders the option of paying bills online by credit card.

Allowing bills to be paid by credit card can be an enormous time saver for the billing administrator. Bills paid this way can automatically issue receipts and update any dependent membership applications with the bill's new status. In contrast, a billing administrator must manually record the receipt of payment by any other means, including checks, wire transfers, and money orders.

When a bill is paid by credit card, the bill's status is forever links to the credit card transaction used to pay that bill. If that transaction is later refunded in Kavi Commerce, the bill will automatically be updated to reflect that refund. If Kavi Billing doesn't receive a decisive success or failure message for a transaction, the bill will be marked as Awaiting Gateway until the transaction settles in Kavi Commerce.