Return premium plans

A return premium plan is a plan associated with a policy that determines how credits from negative charges are applied to unpaid invoice items for the policy. Every policy must have a return premium plan, but when you create a policy, you do not specify a plan. Rather, BillingCenter assigns a return premium plan to the policy. The assigned plan is the active plan with the lowest plan order value (typically "1") at the time the policy is created. For a complete description of the business functionality of return premium plans, see the Application Guide.

Some functionality is common to all plans. This includes the following:

  • Plan order
  • Endpoints for plan testing
  • Multicurrency functionality with plans

For more information on the common functionality, see Overview of plans.

Return premium plan structure

A return premium plan consists of two levels of criteria:

  • A single set of global criteria, which primarily identifies which invoice items are eligible for allocation
  • A set of handling schemes, each of which defines when and how to allocate negative charges for a given type of billing instruction (such as policy change or cancellation)

The global criteria

Return premium plans inherently apply only to invoice items that meet all of the following criteria:

  • Have a positive amount
  • Are not fully paid
  • Are on direct bill invoices
  • Are not affected by any hold

The chargeQualification field identifies additional criteria to identify the eligible invoice items. It is set to one of the values from the ReturnPremiumChargeQualification typelist:

Code Description
Account Same Payer
Policy Same Payer and Policy
PolicyPeriod Same Payer and Policy Period
ChargePattern Same Payer, Policy Period, and Charge Pattern
ChargeCategory Same Payer, Policy Period, and Charge Category
ChargeGroup Same Payer, Policy Period, and Charge Group

Return premium plans also have a global criteria named listBillAccountExcessTreatment. This setting identifies which unapplied fund to use for list bill policies. It is set to a value from the ListBillAccountExcess typelist. In the base configuration, there are two possible values:

  • PolicyOwnerUnapplied - Specifies the policy owner default or policy designated unapplied as the target for any returned premium
    • PolicyPayerUnapplied - Specifies the policy payer unapplied as the target for any returned premium

The handling schemes

A handling scheme is a set of criteria that defines a set of negative charges and when and how to execute allocation for those charges. Handling schemes specify the following:

  • The billing instruction type that the scheme applies to
  • The point in time that each negative invoice item is allocated to the eligible positive items
  • How to prioritize the eligible positive invoice items when the negative charge amount is not large enough to cover all eligible items
  • What to do with the excess amount if the negative charge amount is larger than all eligible items
  • Whether to restrict invoice items based on the associated charge's effective date

As of this release, you cannot query for, create, or modify handling schemes through Cloud API.