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Associating Users with Billing Accounts

A billing account is an optional shortcut for the times when a researcher's costs are covered by a specific account — a grant, a department, a sponsoring institution. Once a user is linked to an account, that account becomes selectable on their requests, which makes recording payments against it straightforward.

Linking happens on the user record, not the request. You associate a researcher with the accounts they're entitled to use, and from then on those accounts show up as options when you process their requests. A user can be linked to as many accounts as you need, and any account can be linked to many users.

When you'll use this
  • A researcher arrives whose work is funded by a department or grant account, and you want that account available on their requests.
  • You're setting up a new patron who should be able to charge to an existing institutional account.
  • A researcher's funding changes and you need to add or remove an account on their record.
This page is about the link, not the account itself

Creating the billing accounts you link to here is a separate task — see Managing Billing Accounts. This page assumes the accounts already exist and covers connecting them to a user.

Where to find it​

Billing account associations live on a dedicated tab in the user record:

  1. Open the researcher's user record (search for them, or open them from a request).
  2. Select the Billing Accounts tab.
  3. The tab lists every account currently linked to this user, in a table with Account ID and Description columns. The tab header shows the count, for example Billing Accounts (2).

If the researcher has no linked accounts yet, the tab shows No billing accounts instead of a table.

Adding an account to a user​

  1. On the Billing Accounts tab, click Add.
  2. The Add Billing Account dialog opens with a search box reading "Search by account ID or description..."
  3. Start typing the account's ID or part of its description. Search begins once you've entered at least 2 characters — until then the dialog prompts "Start typing to search." You can search on more than one word; for example, typing grant history matches accounts whose ID or description contains both terms.
  4. Matching accounts appear in a table with Account ID and Description columns. Accounts already linked to this user are filtered out, so you only ever see accounts you can still add.
  5. Click the + button on the row for the account you want.
  6. Aeon confirms with an "Account added" message, the dialog closes, and the new account appears in the tab's table.
Realistic example

A researcher working on request #12345 is funded by the History Department's photoduplication account. Open their user record, go to Billing Accounts, click Add, type history, and click + on the History Dept Photoduplication (HIST-PD) row. The account is now linked, and when you open request #12345's Billing tab it will be selectable there.

A user can hold many accounts

There's no limit on how many accounts you link to a single user, and the same account can be shared across many users. You can't link the same account twice: any account already on this user is filtered out of the Add Billing Account search, so it never appears as something to add.

Removing an account from a user​

  1. On the Billing Accounts tab, find the account's row.
  2. Click the trash-can button at the end of the row.
  3. A Remove Billing Account confirmation appears: "Remove account "HIST-PD" from jdoe? This won't delete the account, just the association."
  4. Click Remove to confirm, or Cancel to keep it.
  5. Aeon confirms with an "Account removed" message and the row disappears from the table.
Removing the link does not affect past requests

Removing an account from a user only breaks the link between that user and that account going forward. It does not delete the account, and it does not strip the account from requests it was already assigned to. A researcher's earlier requests keep their billing account so historical and in-progress billing is never disturbed — you're only changing which accounts are available on new requests for this user.

Merging users carries account links across

When two user records are merged, the billing-account associations from the user being merged away are copied to the surviving record (any account the surviving user already has is skipped, so no duplicates are created). A merge never silently drops a researcher's funding links.

Permissions
  • Viewing the Billing Accounts tab is available to anyone who can open the user record.
  • Adding or removing an account association requires the Edit level of the Users permission. If your role is view-only for users, the Add button and the per-row remove buttons don't appear.
Editor review — remove this callout (and the HTML comment below it) before publishing
  • Screenshots needed: (1) the Billing Accounts tab showing linked accounts; (2) the Add Billing Account search dialog with results.

The full generation metadata — sources, files read, and verifications — is in the HTML comment directly below this callout. When this page has been reviewed and approved, delete both this callout and that comment; a page with no Editor-review callout is one that's done.