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Home > Tamarac Reporting > Billing > Billing Theory > Understanding the Difference Between Billing Groups and Reporting Groups
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Understanding the Difference Between Billing Groups and Reporting Groups
Tamarac offers a number of ways to organize your accounts, depending on the relationships between accounts and clients. Groups for reporting and groups for billing are both ways of collecting related accounts together, but they serve very different purposes. On this page, you'll learn more about when to use each group type.
For more information about entities within Tamarac, see Introduction to Accounts, Groups, Households, and Clients.
A billing group is a collection of financial accounts you want aggregated together to determine the billable value and the billed amount. By treating these accounts as a group, you can avoid managing the billing preferences of accounts on an individual basis. Instead, you can attach the billing information such as billing definitions, payment distribution, adjustments, and statement display options to all the billing group member accounts at once. Billing groups drive the billable value, underlying data, and adjustments used to calculate the fees.
A billing group can include both regular accounts and partial ownership accounts.
If you include ownership accounts in billing groups, you could inadvertently double bill. Review ownership account and billing group behavior carefully before adding partial ownership accounts to a billing group.
For example, billing groups might include:
| Related Topics | Details |
|---|---|
| Understanding Billing Groups | Learn more about billing groups and when to use them. |
| Create, Edit, or Delete a Billing Group | Learn about how to manage billing groups. |
A group is a collection of accounts you combine to facilitate group-level activity. One of the ways you can use groups is for group-level performance calculations and reporting. One important difference between groups for reporting and Households is that you can run dynamic reports on groups but usually not on Households.
A group is a separate entity apart from the accounts that group contains. You can put as many accounts or other groups into a group for reporting as you wish. For example, John and Georgia Abbey are a married couple, each of whom have individual accounts, as well as a joint account. In order to report on the performance of all of these accounts as a whole, you create the Abbey Reporting Group, which contains each of John and Georgia's accounts.
| Related Topics | Details |
|---|---|
| Introduction to Accounts, Groups, Households, and Clients | Learn more about the different entities within Tamarac and when to use each one. |
| Creating and Modifying Groups | Learn about how to manage reporting groups. |
The following examples help clarify how firms can use billing groups and reporting groups.
Georgia and Michael Abbey have a joint brokerage account and individual retirement accounts with Cherry Street Financial. Both of them can see everything about all three accounts.
Cherry Street creates the following groups for the Abbey family.
| Group Type | Group Membership | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Reporting group |
One reporting group contains the brokerage account and both retirement accounts. |
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| 1 Billing group |
One billing group contains the brokerage account and both retirement accounts. |
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Joe and Jill Abrams have a joint brokerage account and individual retirement accounts with Cherry Street Financial. They also have 529 accounts for each of their two children.
Cherry Street creates the following groups for the Abrams family.
| Number of each Group Type | Group Membership | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Reporting groups |
One reporting group contains the brokerage account and both retirement accounts. Another reporting group contains just the 529 accounts. |
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| 1 Billing group |
One billing group contains the brokerage account, both retirement accounts, and both 529 accounts. |
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Christopher Baker has just assumed control of his trust and his 529 account. His parents, Jennifer and Michael, will continue paying his management fees from their brokerage account. Jennifer and Michael continue to keep their own accounts managed separately.
Cherry Street creates the following groups for the Baker family.
| Group Type | Group Membership | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Reporting groups |
One reporting group contains Christopher's trust account and 529 account. One reporting group contains Jennifer and Michael's accounts. |
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| 2 Billing groups |
One billing group contains Christopher's trust, 529, and Jennifer and Michael's brokerage account as a payment account only. The brokerage account is excluded from billable value for Christopher's billing group. One billing group contains all of Jennifer and Michael's accounts, including their brokerage account. |
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When you generate billing history and create billing statements, you typically generate a PDF report for a reporting group on the Accounts page. There may be times when the reporting group you use to generate the statement contains different members than the billing group. In that case, Tamarac generates history and a statement for all the billing groups represented within the reporting group. The files are aggregated into a ZIP file that you download from the PDF Report Status page.
Reporting Group ABC contains accounts A, B, and C.
Accounts A and B are assigned to Billing Group AB.
Account C is assigned to Billing Group C.
When you run a PDF statement for Reporting Group ABC, Tamarac generates one PDF statement for Billing Group AB and a separate statement for Billing Group C.
Use the following settings to configure billing statements to show details for some, but not all, accounts in a billing group:
|
Setting |
Use |
|---|---|
| Determine who sees details of the bill: Accounts that are being billed or accounts that are paying the bill. | |
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When All, Some, or No Billing or Payment Accounts Are In the Reporting Group, Show |
Determine how much detail billing statements display for different billing group and reporting group membership options. |
| Combine the accounts that are not in the billing group into a single line item on the statement. |