A general ledger under the bills, not beside them.
Most retail billing systems produce invoices and then export a summary into accounting. Conduit posts every invoice, payment, deposit, refund and adjustment to a double-entry ledger as it happens — so there is one answer to what you are owed.
Off your desk
You stop closing the month by exporting three systems into a workbook and arguing about which one is right.
Without this
What this looks like today.
The usual month-end goes like this: export the billing system, export the payment processor, open the accounting package, and spend two days working out which of the three is right. Everyone has a story about the workbook that reconciles the other systems, and the person who maintains it.
The reason it happens is that billing systems in this industry tend to treat accounting as a downstream report. Invoices are records in one table, payments in another, and the relationship between them is reconstructed at the point somebody asks. Adjustments are edits. Corrections overwrite. By the time you need to explain a balance from eight months ago, the evidence for it has been amended.
It is also the part of the stack an auditor cares about most, and the part that is hardest to fix later.
How it works
Billing & the ledger, in detail.
A real double-entry general ledger under the bills — every invoice, payment, deposit and adjustment posts to it.
The bill run, in one pass
Meter reads land, usage is rated against the customer's plan, delivery charges are applied from the TDU tariff, taxes are computed, and the invoice posts to the ledger. Exceptions queue for a person; everything else simply bills. It is a scheduled job, not a screen somebody drives.
Double entry, genuinely
Every invoice, payment, deposit, refund, NSF return, write-off and adjustment produces journal entries against real accounts. The AR aging and the trial balance are read from those entries rather than assembled from the operational tables — which is why they agree with each other without anyone reconciling them.
Corrections are entries, not edits
A mistake is corrected by posting a reversal, not by amending the original. The history of an account is therefore the complete story of what was billed and what was done about it, which is what makes a balance explainable months later.
Payment plans, including real average billing
Levelized plans and average monthly billing are both supported, including the true rolling-average method rather than only the flat levelized approximation the term is often used for. A plan is a policy on the account, so the bill run applies it without anyone remembering to.
Deposits, returns and the awkward cases
Deposits held and applied, refunds, returned payments and the reversals they require are modelled explicitly, because these are where a simplified billing model starts producing balances nobody can explain.
At a glance
- Invoices assembled from usage, rate structure, delivery charges and taxes in one pass
- Payments, deposits, refunds, NSF returns and adjustments, each with its own journal entries
- Levelized and average-monthly payment plans, including the true rolling-average method
- Trial balance and AR aging that reconcile, because they are read from the same ledger the bills wrote to
Connected
What this leans on.
Nothing here is a separate product with an integration between it and the rest. These are the capabilities this one shares a record and a ledger with.
Questions
The ones we actually get.
Is this a real general ledger, or a report that looks like one?
A real one. Every financial event posts journal entries against accounts as it happens, inside the same transaction that wrote the operational record. The AR aging and the trial balance are queries over those entries, which is why they reconcile without a reconciliation step.
Do we still need a separate accounting package?
Most retailers keep one for corporate accounting — payroll, fixed assets, tax filing. What changes is that it receives a ledger that already balances, rather than three exports that have to be argued about first.
Which payment plans are supported?
Levelized billing and average monthly billing, including the true rolling-average method as well as the flat levelized approach. Deferred payment arrangements set up through collections post to the same ledger.
How are billing errors corrected?
By posting a reversal and a corrected entry, never by editing the original. The account history stays intact, so a balance can still be explained a year later — which is the property auditors and disputes both depend on.
The rest of the platform
One customer record, one ledger, one audit trail.
See it against your own book.
Bring a month of real transactions and a TDSP invoice. Billing & the ledger is easier to judge against data you already argue about than against a demo tenant.