Policies
A policy is a written contract for insurance between an insurance company and policyholder stating details of coverage. Policies are issued on accounts. Accounts are responsible for paying for one or more policies.
When a policy is issued on an account, the policy administration system sends a billing request to BillingCenter. The billing request contains information on the policy, such as charges, the policy number, the policy period, and the payment plan. BillingCenter uses this billing request to create invoices that will be sent to the payer account.
You can initiate the policy issuance process in BillingCenter by sending a billing request via Cloud API. For more information on issuing policies through Cloud API, see Issuing policies.
For more information on how policies are handled in BillingCenter, see the Application Guide
Policy periods
A policy period is the period during which a policy is in effect. A policy has one or more policy periods. When a policy is issued in BillingCenter, a policy period on that policy must be specified. Renewing or changing a policy also results in a new policy period.
A policy period has the same number as the policy, but with a hyphen and an integer added to the end. This integer is the term number of the policy period. For example, a policy called “Personal-Auto-Policy” would have a first policy period with the name “Personal-Auto-Policy-1”.
In BillingCenter, the policyPeriod object belongs to the
policy object. In addition to the effective dates of the policy
period, the policyPeriod object contains some information about a
policy that is not included in the policy object. For example, the
PolicyPeriod object includes billing and invoicing information,
effective dates, payer accounts, and delinquency plans. The policy number sent from
the policy administration system and the policy period number are both stored in the
policyPeriod object. For examples of
policyPeriod and policy objects, see Querying for policies and policy periods.