Billing Account Selection on Requests

A billing account is an optional shortcut for the times when a request's costs are covered by a specific account — a grant, a department, a sponsoring institution. Assigning an account to a request records who is paying, makes the account's ID and description available to print and email templates, and lets you record payments against that account in a consistent way.

Assignment is per request. A request may carry at most one billing account, and a billing account is never required — most requests have none. The accounts you can assign are the ones already linked to the request's researcher (see Associating Users with Billing Accounts), and the accounts themselves are created and maintained separately (see Managing Billing Accounts).

When you'll use this

• A researcher's photoduplication costs are being charged to a grant or department account, and you want that account recorded on the request so it flows onto the invoice.
• You're tidying up a request before invoicing and need to set, change, or clear which account it's billed to.
• You're checking which account a request is currently assigned to.

note

This page is about the account on the request

Linking an account to a researcher happens on the user record — see Associating Users with Billing Accounts. Creating the accounts themselves is covered in Managing Billing Accounts. This page is about which single account an individual request is billed to.

What the account does on a request

When a billing account is assigned to a request:

• The account's ID and description are stored against the request and exposed to print and email templates (historically as the BillingAccountID and BillingAccountDescription fields), so an invoice can show which account is being billed.
• The assignment travels with the request through its workflow and onto its charges, so payments recorded for the request are tied to that account.
• Only one account can be assigned at a time. Setting a new account replaces whatever was there; clearing it removes the assignment entirely.

The account assignment is independent of the request's charges, payments, and invoice. Setting an account does not add a charge, and removing one does not delete any billing data — it only changes which account the request is billed to. For charges, payments, and invoices, see the Request Billing Tab.

Choosing an account for a request

The account you assign to request #12345 must be one already linked to the request's researcher. That's the point of the link on the user record: it defines the set of accounts a given researcher is entitled to bill against, so you can't accidentally charge a request to an unrelated account.

1. Make sure the account exists (Managing Billing Accounts) and is linked to the request's researcher (Associating Users with Billing Accounts).
2. Open request #12345.
3. Set the request's billing account to the one you want — for example, History Dept Photoduplication (HIST-PD).

Assigning an account stores the link against the request immediately; there is no separate charge or invoice step involved in the assignment itself.

Changing or clearing the account

• To change the account, assign a different one — the new account replaces the previous assignment.
• To clear the account, set it back to none. The request is left with no billing account, but its charges, payments, and any invoice are untouched.

The account must exist

You can only assign an account that exists in Aeon. Assigning an account ID that isn't on file is rejected — the request keeps whatever assignment it already had. If the account you need isn't available, create it first (Managing Billing Accounts) and link it to the researcher.

How cloning and researcher changes affect the account

The billing account assignment is sticky in the ways that protect historical billing, and is dropped only when it would no longer make sense:

• Cloning a request copies the billing account to the clone only if that account is valid for the clone's user and researcher. If it isn't, the clone is created without an account, and Aeon notes "Billing account was not copied." in the clone result. The account doesn't matter on the clone until photoduplication is initiated on it — but once it is, the account is already in place.
• Changing or clearing a request's researcher can leave a previously valid account no longer valid (because the account was linked to the old researcher, not the new one). Aeon checks for this before you make the change and warns you which requests would be affected, so an account change is never silent.

Permissions

• Viewing a request's billing account is available to anyone who can open the request — the View level of the Requests permission.
• Setting, changing, or clearing a request's billing account requires the Edit level of the Requests permission. (This is the Requests permission, not the Billing permission — assigning the account is treated as editing the request, while charges and payments on the Billing tab are gated by the Billing permission.)

Editor review — remove this callout (and the HTML comment below it) before publishing

This page needs SME input before it can be published — there is an open question about whether the on-request selector is exposed in the staff web UI yet:

• UI gap — confirm before publishing: the backend fully supports getting and setting a request's billing account (GET/PUT /api/v2/requests/{n}/account), and sibling pages tell staff the account is "selectable on the request's Billing tab." But in the current staff web client code I could find no billing-account selector on the request form or Billing tab: there is no account get/set call in the request API layer, and the account list is only loaded on the user record and the Billing Accounts manager — never on a request. Confirm whether (a) the on-request selector ships in this release (and where it lives / what its exact label is), or (b) it's still pending — in which case this page should be reframed as forthcoming, and the cross-link in Associating Users with Billing Accounts softened to match.
• Payment-method auto-fill: V6 added "Billing Account" to a request's payment-method dropdown and auto-filled the payment reference with the account ID when chosen. The V7 payment panel populates payment methods from the PaymentMethod custom dropdown only and has no such auto-fill — confirm this V6 convenience is intentionally dropped (or document where it now lives).
• Researcher-change validity check: verify the staff-facing wording for the "this account would become invalid" warning when a researcher is changed/cleared, so the copy matches what users actually see.
• Screenshots needed: the billing-account control on a request (once its location/label is confirmed).

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.