“Kids today – who can understand them? Of course, this is a timeless sentiment, but one that’s no less true today, with young ones constantly nose-to-the-glass with smartphones and tablets, chatting with their friends. If you dare to peek at their tweets and posts, other than a near hieroglyphic scroll of emoji, you’ll find a language of all their own.”
That’s the beginning of the TIME article that lists terms like B/C, SMH, Bae, ADN and AF and gave a glossary for what each term actually means. I knew about 5 of them.
The same’s true in billing. If you heard someone say, “Billers today—who can understand them?” could you even argue? Dunning, Proration, Refactoring, billing in arrears… need I continue?
I did, and typed up the billing terms that I heard in the last week: 29 in total.
My point isn’t that billing has a ton of terms (which it does), but more a question of whether they are understood by everyone in your organization. Sure, other departments might hear them all the time, but how many of them actually know what they mean?
I made a billing crossword puzzle to prove my point. Print it and fill it in. Have your peers in other departments take it, too. The best score I’ve seen thus far is 27/29 (without cheating) and most people (outside of finance) end up scoring in the mid 20s. Just because something is a term others hear all the time doesn’t mean everyone knows it. When you use billing terms or phrases in reports, papers, or even in meetings, it’s best to define them up front so there is no confusion. To help you with this, we recently published a glossary of key billing terms your teams use every day.
