Billing Cost and Rate Clerk

What is a Billing, Cost and Rate Clerk?

Billing, cost, and rate clerks are responsible for the many clerical duties associated with invoicing and billing. They collect data, perform essential calculations, maintain financial records, and communicate with clients on the state of their accounts. This job is highly mathematical in nature, with a heavy focus on finances. It’s important to have a solid understanding of interest rates, late fees, and finance charges.

Though billing, cost, and rate clerks will spend a great deal of their time working on bills and account management, they also have direct contact with customers. They may connect with customers to verify account information, set up payment plans, or notify them of unpaid balances. It’s important to have strong communication and customer service skills for this part of the job. A good billing, cost, and rate clerk will be able to explain the client’s account to them in layman’s terms that are easily understandable, even to those who are not employed in finance.

Billing, cost, and rate clerks should be familiar with basic accounting, business principles, and spreadsheet processing software. They will be responsible for entering data, performing calculations, generating reports, and maintaining files on the computer. Staying up-to-date with the latest computer systems will help you increase your employability in this career.

Job Responsibilities

• Contacting clients to verify account information
• Updating invoices and billing documents
• Maintaining accurate invoices
• Generating billing documents, credit forms, and other essential paperwork
• Creating itemized statements
• Handling bookkeeping
• Answering the telephone to assist customers with inquiries
• Opening and addressing inquiries via mail

Billing, Cost and Rate Clerks: Career Outlook

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 116,600 openings for financial clerks are projected each year, on average, over the decade. All of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire.

Automation and streamlined processing via smart computer systems is taking over many of the responsibilities of financial clerks. Since billing, cost, and rate clerks still have an important degree of human interaction with clients, this career area has remained safe from much of the decline that’s impacted other types of financial clerks.

Employment Settings

Billing, cost, and rate clerks work for a variety of financial institutions. Though the BLS doesn’t collect data specific to billing and posting clerks, it reports that 19 percent of financial clerks work with insurance carriers and related activities. Another 18 percent work in credit intermediation and 18 percent are employed in healthcare and social assistance. Billing, cost, and rate clerks typically work full-time in an office setting.