Expenditure / Billing

Background

In a government setting, payments can be categorized into two main types: payments made to the government and made by the government.

Payments made to the Government are payments received by the government, categorized as receipts or revenue. Payments to the government can be divided into two types: demand-based collection and non-demand-based collection.

Payments Made by the Government are expenses incurred by the government. Examples include: Salaries, Wages, Beneficiary payments, Contractor Payments, or Ad Hoc Payments.

Demand-Based Collection

  1. Demand Generation: The government generates a demand for payments.

    • Examples: Property Tax, Trade License, Water Tax.

  2. Invoice Issuance: An invoice is issued by the government detailing the demands. This invoice specifies what is owed to the government, including taxes, charges, or levies.

  3. Payment by Citizen: The citizen acknowledges the demand and pays the specified amount.

  4. Receipt Issuance: A receipt is issued to the citizen upon payment, acknowledging the receipt of the amount.

Non-Demand-Based Collection

  • Collections are made without a prior demand being generated by the government.

The DIGIT demand and billing service is used to manage payments made to governments.

Approach

For any transaction to happen, there is a payer, payee, amount and entity details

  • Payer and Payee can be individuals or organizations.

  • Entity details contain other information which are important for a bill to be generated but not mandatory for payment advice

    Examples - Invoice ID, Invoice date, Verification details etc

Every transaction ideally starts with an invoice equivalent that is generated by the supplier/contractor/muster/contract/payroll etc against which a payee generates a bill in the name of the payer.

A bill can have single or multiple beneficiaries depending on verifiable information sources.

Example - If a muster roll has 20 beneficiaries, Bill also can have 20 beneficiaries. It is not needed to create 20 individual bills.

A single invoice should not be split into multiple bills.

Example - Even though the material is supplied in tranches, a single PO can lead to multiple invoices and only after the consumption of the entire material as per individual invoice and associated measurement book a bill for that invoiced amount can be created and paid.

Payment advice is generated to enable beneficiary payments and the module is integrated with a payment gateway.

Hence payment advice contains minimal information required for the bank/gateway to make the payment. Limits on the number of beneficiaries and amounts etc are configurable as needed by the integration.

Expenditure module

Expenses are created by the JE and approved by ME, EE/ EO depending on the amount and associated approval authority.

This module should have the following components

Header Details

  1. Bill ID

  2. Bill Date

  3. Party Bill ID

  4. Party Bill Date

  5. Bill Type

    • Salary/Pension Bill - Based on Payroll, leaves, PF, GPF, other allowances

    • Advance Bill

      • Unlike other bills which are post-work/service completion and measurement, the advance bill is raised prior and adjusted later.

      • Advance bill is horizontal and be applicable on top of all other bill types

    • Works/Contractor Bill

      • A contractor bill is created and measured against the measurement books and contract(work order) objects for verification.

      • When a user selects to pay a contractor bill, the user can select against which measurement books of the contract this bill is being raised, and accordingly bill amount will be calculated.

    • Muster/Labour Bill -

      • A labour bill is created from a muster roll and usually has multiple beneficiaries within the same bill.

      • When a user selects to pay a wages bill, the user can select which muster rolls to process as part of this bill, and accordingly bill amount and array of beneficiaries will be processed.

    • Supplier/Vendor Bill

      • A vendor bill is similar to a contractor bill where as here instead of a measurement book and work order, an invoice and material receipt register or purchase order are used for verification.

      • A vendor bill should ideally be against each invoice as submitted by the supplier.

      • Right now, there is no material receipt register or purchase order against which invoices are verified. Hence invoice in V1, cannot be as verifiable as we are verifying wage bills against muster rolls.

    • Contingency/Expense Bill

      • Ad Hoc expenses

    • Supervision Bill

      • This type of Bill is calculated as a percentage on top of other types of approved bills.

    • Others (need more use cases)

Debit Details

  1. Account Code, Account head, Debit Amount

    • Treasury Payments - {Major, Sub Major, Minor, Sub Minor, Detail, Object head, Debit Amount}

    • ULB Payments - {Fund, Functionary, Budget head, Scheme, Sub Scheme, Debit Amount}

  2. This should be configurable at the tenant level to choose what type of accounting system is followed.

  3. Debit details should ideally be captured at the time of project creation. This helps in budget checks being done.

  4. Each Project will be associated with a set of account codes and percentage amounts of the entire project, from where debit will happen.

  5. Similarly, respective amounts (lumpsum/percentage) should be chosen from these account codes for each bill created.

  6. Service should not allow debit more than the initial quoted amount under respective heads against the sum of all the bills created for the project.

Deductions

  1. The amount that is deducted from the gross value of the bill as these are already included in the work line items

  2. Deductions are classified into many types

    • Internal transfer

      • Example - SOR line items already include cess 1%. Hence it is deducted here and transferred to the labour welfare account head.

      • SOR line items also include royalty on the material. That needs to be deducted from here and transferred to Tahsildar.

    • Advance recoveries

      Amounts paid earlier for mobilization advancement or material procurement etc are deducted while creating a new bill.

    • Retention Money

      Money is withheld for payments and paid at a later date after the defect liability period.

  3. Deductions are always done against a beneficiary.

    If a bill contains multiple beneficiaries, it needs to be specified against which beneficiary the deductions are made.

  4. Credit Details

    A bill can have multiple beneficiaries. However, the nature of payments or beneficiary types should be the same for all beneficiaries in one bill.

    • Wage seekers bill should contain only beneficiaries for wages

    • Material bills should contain only vendors and be verified against their invoices

  5. Once the bill of any type is created, this will go for approval and have wfstatus.

  6. Every bill will also have a beneficiary payment status.

    • In the absence of intergrations with Banks/IFMS, this status can be updated manually to mark beneficiary payments.

    • In the presence of integration, systems should show the status of payment.

    • Once a bill is approved, payment advice needs to be created and sent to an integrated system. This system will send back the success/failure status along with the reasons.

  7. In case of payment failure, Works should allow modifying the bill, marking the changes as mentioned in the error codes and resubmitting.

    • This will create a new payment advice, linking reference to an earlier bill.

Bill Attributes

Functional Requirements

Bill Objection reasons

Actions to resolve: Works Specifications

Expenditure Service Domain Modeling

Budget Checks

  1. Input to expenditure service is when a project is created and an estimate is to be approved.

    • Expenditure will query the program service to get the status of fund availability.

Budget Blocking

  1. In case funds are available, the expenditure service can also ask the program service to block respective funds (from estimation) for this project.

    • The budget hence is blocked and won’t be available for the next projects.

Release Blocked Budget

  1. The expenditure module should also have a provision to release the pre-blocked budget. So this can be used for other projects. Or the existing project for which the budget has been blocked is deferred.

Expense Planning

  1. The expenditure service will also have a planning module which will give timelines of expenses and respective amounts to funding agencies.

    • The blocking module also feeds into the planning module to block funds on time.

Billing management

  1. Bills are created under contracts (projects)

  2. A contract is issued by Payer to Payee.

    • The contract can be materials, labour, services, supervision etc

  3. A payee in turn issues invoices against the contract on the supply of material/services.

    • After successful verification of supplies and invoices, the payer adds bills into the finance system

    • A voucher is created in the accounting system for auditing purposes.

    • Payment advice is sent to the bank for making financial transactions.

    • The voucher and bill statutes are updated once the payments are made.

  4. Validations

    1. A contract can have multiple invoices raised by the payee before the contract is deemed closed.

    2. An invoice can be a material invoice, labor invoice (Muster roll), invoice for supervision charges.

    3. PS: Not every time an invoice is required to generate a bill.

      • Ex. Salary Bill, Advance bill, contingency bill etc doesn't need any invoices.

    4. An invoice can have multiple line items.

      • Incase of a restaurant bill - Restaurant captures additional GST amount on net amount. All line items are paid immediately by the service seeker.They pay the taxes collected from all invoices to respective government bodies at set intervals.

      • Incase of a salary bill - All line items are not immediately paid to the service provider (Employee). Instead the employer deducts TDS and only pays part amount to the employee. Employer remits this amount to government body. Even the employee remits his part if the tax at regular intervals.

      • An invoice can also have multiple beneficiaries and headwise breakfups for each beneficiary.

    5. An invoice when entered into the system creates a Bill. A bill entity internally will have multiple line items each by payer, beneficiary, amount and head combination.

      • So a muster roll with 1 payer, 3 payees, each payee having 500 rs payable and 50 rs deduction on ESI can be on 1 bill with 6 line items.

    6. This bill when processed will create voucher in accounting system

    7. A payment voucher however can be a combination of multiple payers and payees by line items. From above example

      • There can be minimum of 2 payment advices one for all payables of 450 rs to each individual

      • Other for all ESI deductions directed to ESI department.

      • This will help payments go faster to respective departments.

    8. Once the payments are made, respective bill line items will be updated with statuses. Once all bill line items are updated, overall bill will be updated with status.

Last updated

All content on this page by eGov Foundation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.