Overview
The 26.1 release of Bill Explainer introduces ACP Flexible Payment Plans, along with updates that improve payment clarity, engagement, analytics, and accessibility compliance. This release helps consumers better understand Pay Today vs Total Due, enables secure embedded payments, delivers clearer item‑level explanations, expands productized analytics, and establishes WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility support for the explainer microsite. Together, these enhancements improve trust, usability, and insight while maintaining a consistent, scalable Bill Explainer experience.
ACP Flexible Payment Plans
Bill Explainer now clearly distinguishes Pay Today from Total Due for accounts enrolled in ACP Flexible Payment Plans, helping consumers understand what they owe now versus the overall amount. When a plan is detected, Total Due is shown separately in the Bill Summary, the primary payment action is updated to Pay Today, and AI insights adjust to reflect high-level plan‑related changes. For accounts without a payment plan, the Bill Explainer experience remains unchanged.
ACP Flexible Payment Plans require ACP and client activation.
ACP Embedded Payments
Introduces ACP Embedded Payments, allowing consumers to securely pay their bill directly within the Bill Explainer experience without being redirected to an external site. The embedded payment flow launches ACP’s hosted payment experience inline and provides clear outcomes for successful, failed, or canceled payment attempts. This capability helps reduce payment drop‑off, pairs bill explanations with immediate action, and enables clients to improve payment conversion while delivering a seamless, trusted payment experience.
ACP Embedded Payments require ACP and client activation.
Item-Level Explanations
Bill Explainer now supports Item‑Level Explanations in What Changed experience, allowing admins to define clear, custom messaging for individual bill items instead of relying only on generic explanations. When configured, consumers see more relevant explanations for specific line‑item changes such as charges, partial charges, or taxes. If item‑specific explanations are not available, existing category‑level explanations continue to apply automatically.
Admins now configure custom explanations per bill item in Studio for the What's Changed page, across four scenarios - charge added, removed, increased, or decreased - with productized defaults that can be published as-is or personalized to brand voice. A four-tier fallback (use case → item → section → generic) guarantees every bill change is explained on the consumer microsite.
Accessibility Compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA)
Bill Explainer now supports WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards for the Explainer microsite experience, helping clients meet global accessibility expectations and deliver a more inclusive self‑service journey. This release establishes a strong accessibility baseline across core microsite interactions, improving usability for customers who rely on keyboard navigation, assistive technologies, and enhanced visual readability. These enhancements strengthen consistency and confidence in the Bill Explainer experience while supporting broader compliance and accessibility goals.
WCAG 2.1 AA conformance covers the Explainer consumer microsite. Compliance is enforced continuously through automated CI checks that block builds on critical violations. A formal VPAT and Deque-certified audit are available on a per-client basis when contractually requested.
WCAG 2.2 alignment and studio (admin module) accessibility is planned for a future release.
Continuous Improvements
Site Analytics - Unique Visitors
Bill Explainer Site Analytics now includes a Unique Visitors metric for the “What Changed” page, giving clients clearer insight into how many distinct consumers engage with bill comparisons. The dashboard now shows unique visitor trends over time, improving visibility into adoption, aligning with legacy Google Analytics (GA) reporting, and maintaining consistent analytics across all Bill Explainer clients.
MoM Trend Comparison
Bill Explainer analytics dashboards now support Month‑over‑Month (MoM) trend analysis alongside existing Day‑over‑Day (DoD) views for key engagement metrics, including Site Visits, Pay Now Clicks, and What Changed Clicks. This enhancement enables clients to track long‑term engagement trends while retaining daily visibility for operational monitoring. Both views use the same standardized metrics and data model and are applied consistently across all productized Bill Explainer dashboards, delivering scalable analytics without performance impact.
Stability and Performance Improvements
This release includes stability and performance enhancements that improve reliability, consistency, and overall usability across the Bill Explainer experience. Updates focus on bill content accuracy, What Changed behavior, widget rendering, totals and statement handling, invoice display, accessibility refinements, and configuration validation to ensure the microsite behaves predictably and reflects the most up‑to‑date billing information.
Release 26.1 helps businesses
Improving payment clarity and trust by clearly distinguishing Pay Today from Total Due for customers on payment plans.
Increasing payment conversion through embedded payments that let consumers pay securely within Bill Explainer.
Reducing bill confusion and support effort with clearer, item‑level explanations for bill changes.
Strengthening engagement insights with enhanced analytics, including unique visitor metrics and MoM trends.
Expanding accessibility and usability through improved keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and clearer error messaging.