Utilities do not sell items, they sell consumption over time against a regulated tariff. Dynamics 365 Business Central ships an excellent sales invoicing engine, but it has no concept of a service connection, a meter, a reading, a billing cycle, or a slab tariff where the first 100 units are priced differently from the next 200. Most utility and energy service providers end up bridging that gap with spreadsheets: readings collected in Excel, consumption and slab arithmetic done by formula, then a bulk sales invoice import back into Business Central. The result is predictable — reading-to-bill errors nobody can audit, no link between an unpaid bill and a disconnection decision, and month-end that depends on one person's workbook.

ECOSIRE builds an AL extension that gives Business Central the missing domain objects and wires them into the standard financial posting routines rather than beside them. New tables carry the Service Connection (customer, premises, connection type, status, security deposit), the Meter and its lifecycle (installation, replacement, multiplier, rollover digits), Meter Reading entries with source and reader stamp, Billing Cycle and Billing Cycle Line for run control, and a Tariff structure with effective-dated versions, slab bands, fixed and minimum charges, taxes and levies. Customer and Item are extended by table and page extensions, so a connection resolves to a real Business Central customer and the charges resolve to real G/L accounts and posting groups — the general ledger, VAT/tax entries, dimensions and customer ledger entries are all produced by the standard posting codeunits, which is what keeps your statutory reporting and audit trail intact.

The operational engine is a set of codeunits driven by Job Queue Entry records so that a cycle billing run for thousands of connections executes in the background rather than locking a user's session. A run validates readings (missing, negative consumption, rollover, exceeds-average tolerance) into an exception list that must be cleared or explicitly approved, computes consumption and applies the slab tariff effective on the reading date, creates sales invoices, and posts them in a resumable batch that can be rerun safely after a failure. Event subscribers on the payment application and cash-receipt routines keep the arrears position current, which is what drives the collection ladder: aging buckets, reminder and notice generation, disconnection-eligible worklists, field disconnection and reconnection orders with reconnection fees, and a full status history per connection. Service and complaint workflows sit on the same connection record, so a meter fault logged against a connection can suspend it from the next billing run instead of quietly producing a wrong bill.

Integration is handled the way Business Central expects. Custom API pages exposed through the REST API v2.0 / OData v4 surface let handheld reading apps, IVR and customer portals post readings and query balances without direct database access; readings can also be imported from CSV or a meter data management system through a configurable mapping. Power Platform and Dataverse connectivity means readings, arrears and disconnection worklists can drive a Power App for field crews and Power BI for regulatory and collection reporting. Permission sets are shipped for the distinct roles this domain always has — meter reader, billing operator, billing supervisor who alone can approve exceptions and post a run, and collections officer — and every posting-relevant action is written to a change-log-friendly audit trail. The extension targets current Business Central release waves and is delivered as a per-tenant extension for SaaS or a compiled extension for on-premises, whichever your deployment is.

This is build-to-order, not an AppSource download. It starts with a scoping call where we walk your tariff book, your reading channels, your billing calendar and your disconnection policy, because those are the details that decide the data model. We then confirm a fixed scope in writing, build against your Business Central version, and deliver to a sandbox for UAT with your own connection and tariff data before anything touches production. Typical delivery is one working week from confirmed scope, longer only if you ask for meter data management integrations or payment-gateway reconciliation that need third-party access. You receive the AL source, a git repository, documentation and training, and a post-go-live support window — the code is yours, and you are not locked to us to change a tariff band.