Creating a hierarchy for billing reports

In Lumen Connect®, you can use hierarchies your spend across different groups and functions of your organization for more informed reporting and analysis. After you create a hierarchy, you can edit it (e.g., to add nodes to it). You can also add descriptions to services to help you read the billing reports more easily. If you no longer need a hierarchy, you can delete it. You can also export a hierarchy to view the full hierarchy in more detail.

You can use hierarchies to structure your data to track your voice usage or spend across different groups and functions of your organization for more informed reporting and analysis: 

  • Review monthly telecom spend by business unit, division, department, group, or other segment of your organization; assign costs among groups that share telecom services.

  • Use a hierarchy like data filters for your reports.

  • Create multiple hierarchies to test and compare different reporting scenarios.
     

A hierarchy mirrors the structure of your organization—business units, regional offices, retail outlets, cooperatives, departments, and other reporting groups. You can set a hierarchy you create as private (available only to you) or public (available for all users in your organization).

To create a hierarchy for billing reports:

  1. Using the left menu, click Billing, then click Billing Reports.

    Lumen Connect shows a list of billing reports for your organization.
Billing Reports (showing Report Templates tab)
  1. Click the Settings tab.
Billing Reports (showing Settings tab)
  1. In the Hierarchy box, click Manage.

    Lumen Connect lists the hierarchies (if any) for your organization. (You can view all public hierarchies and any private hierarchies you created.)
  1. Click Create New Hierarchy.
  1. Type a name for the hierarchy.
  1. In the Customer Number field, select the customer number you want to use for the hierarchy.
  1. Select whether you want the hierarchy to be private (only visible to you) or public (visible to all users in your organization). By default, hierarchies are private.
  1. In the Structure section, add nodes and assign services to build out the hierarchy:

    1. Click Add Node.

    2. In the box for the node, type a name for the node and add a GL (general ledger) code and descriptions for the node as needed.

    3. Click Add Services.

    4. In the window that appears, search for the service(s) you want to assign to the node. You can use the search field to type a service ID or location. You can also filter the list of services by billing account number or status (Active vs. Inactive). When you find the service(s) you want to add, select the checkbox on the row for the service(s), then click Save.

    5. Repeat steps a–d to add more nodes.
  1. When you're done, click Save.

    Lumen Connect saves the billing hierarchy.