Operations
Animal Billing
Making Managing Project Costs Easier
Why Animal Billing?
There is a simpler way to manage transactions, track project costs, and generate online bills for researchers. When integrated with the TOPAZ Operations Suite, our Animal Billing module allows for the easy collection of animal purchases and per diems, while accommodating a wide range of manual transactions used to track a wide range of project costs.
Key Features
- Automatically collect animal purchase costs from Animal Orders, per diem costs from Animal Census, and service costs from other TOPAZ applications
- Calculate per cage and/or per animal per diem costs
- Generate secure draft bills for review by researchers and administrators
- Powerful transaction searching capability including user-defined parameters and robust reporting capabilities
- Integrates with 3rd party accounting systems via web services (may incur additional charges)
How It Works
Animal Billing has several necessary functions to help you track and report on costs. These include My Bills, Per Diems, and Care Days. Learn more about each by reading below.
My Bills
Within Animal Billing it’s possible to create 4 “subtypes” of Manual transaction.
- Manual Purchases would be used when a PI requests the facility to purchase something and bill them back – this might be special diet or bedding or even a piece of equipment.
- Manual Service transactions can be used when the PI requests a service that is billable. If you do not capture this via the VM module, it can be entered as a manual transaction instead.
- Manual per diems can be used to capture the costs for per diems for locations that are not covered by the normal census processes. This might be used for satellite facilities or field study locations that you do not wish to include in normal census activities.
- Journal corrections allow you to either credit or bill PIs for any oversights or errors that are discovered.
Each of these transaction types can be reviewed by the PIs admin staff from the My Bills dashboard, helping to ensure accurate billing and happy researchers!
Care Days
Animal Billing features functions such as Care Days Drill Down. Now, PIs and Administrators have visibility into the cages that make up Per Cage / Per Diem charges.
Per Diem Calculations
Providing accurate per diem charges is a critical function of Elements. These transactions are based on a complex calculation that involves generating the number of care days for each census combination (based on location, cage type, protocol and staff account).
The care day calculation takes into account cages that arrive, leave or move, as well as any “account transfers” that may have taken place.
Within Elements calculate per diems based on animals instead of or in addition to the traditional cage based per diems.
Ready to try TOPAZ Elements?
Contact us today to see how our integrated suite of software solutions can help your organization achieve their goals. Our team of specialists will work with you to identify the tools you need and make recommendations to improve your workflows.