1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to the field of computerized data processing systems and networks and more particularly to a method and apparatus for customizing the data content of electronic documents (e.g., electronic telephone bills) that are to be transmitted throughout a network for review or processing by one or more users of the network.
2. Description of the Related Art
The computer and telecommunications revolutions have replaced to a large degree communications on paper media. As of yet many of the advantages of this revolution have not been fully realized. There is a need to utilize the increased flexibility of communication via electronic documents.
In many organizations, employees make use of office services such as mail, express mail, and telephone for personal, non-business use. The bills for these non-business related expenditures are often rolled-up into one overall bill for the service, for example a telephone bill. In the telephone bill example an organization may ask its employees to classify which of their calls are personal and to calculate the amount of money due and necessary to reimburse the organization for these personal calls. Employees who use corporate wireless phones also need to identify their personal use. Typically, an employee calculates his personal telephone usage with calculator and pencil then notifies the accounting department of the amount due. This process can be tedious and prone to arithmetic and classification errors. Other employees may make use of standalone software applications like Quicken.TM. or Microsoft Money.TM. to record and categorize each expense. Even using these standalone software applications the reimbursement process is still prone to errors during the data entry and data collection. A need exists for automatic data collection, classification and calculation of electronic bills.
In other instances, organizations often need to track telephone calls for client billing purposes. Many times law firms and other service organizations itemize individual telephone charges for clients. The categorizing and calculating of telecommunications, federal, and state taxes is often complex. Electronic delivery of billing data for services is well known. Many service providers, telecommunications providers and electronic commerce vendors deliver their bills electronically and in some cases for large customers, deliver bills on CD-ROMs. These electronic bills delivered electronically, are usually in the same format as their paper bill counterparts and are not readily customizable. In the case of electronic bills on CD-ROM, even though they may be made customizable, such customization requires sophisticated software and cannot be done by individual employee in the company. Therefore, a need exists for customizing the calculation of taxes and apportioning taxes associated with each service bill delivered electronically.
Many times in organizations, electronic billing data is routed to several people in a given department. The process often begins with staff in accounting where the electronic billing data for telephone usage for a given department is sent to a department head. The department head may then forward the electronic billing data via E-mail to a specific employee or group of employees for reconciliation. Electronic billing data is much more susceptible to undetectable data manipulation than their paper bill analogs. Manipulating bits in an electronic billing data does not lend itself to discovery like alterations or manipulation of erasures, strikeouts or whiteouts in the paper analogs. Therefore it is desirable in customizable electronic bills to ensure the integrity of the original billing data. This data integrity requirement is even more important in circumstances where the electronic bill is "bucked around" to several different people for reconciliation. Continuing with the department head example, the department head may manipulate electronic billing data before it is forwarded to the employees. The employees may make subsequent manipulations and modifications such as the categorization of bills to simplify the payment reconciliation's. Afterwards, the employee sends back the modified bill electronically to the department head to be combined or rolled-up into one reconciled bill for accounting. Each recipient along the billing reconciliation route wants to view and understand the data manipulations that were made prior to him/her receiving the bill. A need exists for recipients of electronic billing data to verify the authenticity of not only the original billing data but every subsequent modification or manipulation made to the billing data. Therefore, there exists a need in the art for a method and apparatus to provide customizable electronic billing data with data integrity and which overcomes the above problems.