Bill Cycle Testing

You may want to test your billing cycle to review your billing components over a period of time, such as start and end dates, contract dates, and plan assignment dates.

You can test your billing cycle by utilizing one of the following methods:

• Virtual Time
• Retroactive Start Dates

The main difference between Virtual Time and retroactive start dates is that Virtual Time advances an environment's time to a future date while retroactive start dates look into the past and have no impact on an environment.

Using Virtual Time works within Aria’s stage environments and allows time to be advanced to simulate batch processes.

Reference Set Virtual Time for further instruction and considerations to take into account when using Virtual Time.

Creating accounts using the <retroactive_start_date> parameter in the create_acct_complete_m API allows accounts to be created in the past, to simulate invoicing scenarios over time.

Reference Retroactive Start Dates for further instruction and considerations to take into account when using retroactive start dates.