Billing

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Billing is a business process of invoicing in service contracts , especially in telecommunications and related market areas. Billing comprises the work steps from the receipt of usage data (e.g. landline, cellular network or internet) to the creation of the invoice .

A necessary preliminary stage to billing is the documentation and the coding , which take care of the transfer from narrative prose or weakly structured text into a fixed documentation and billing structure in the case of a wide range of services provided, for example in the health sector .

Billing process

The process essentially consists of the following sub-processes (taking into account that although the terms are subject to a certain common sense, they can vary between individual telecommunications companies and solution providers):

  • Mediation: Collection of usage data (e.g. CDR ) in the network
  • Rating: Evaluation of a single event (e.g. calculating the price for a single phone call)
  • Bill generation: summarizing the priced events and creating a total bill, e.g. B. taking into account discounts
  • Product Management: Management of the components to be sold (e.g. local call, long-distance call) with the technical and organizational aspects. Products can also be product bundles ( e.g. ISDN with three connections, a mailbox and call forwarding)
  • Tariff management ( tariff management): Administration of the rules according to which the price for an individual event is calculated or the total bill is formed.

The following processes are required in the area of ​​billing

  • Customer Administration (customer data management): Creation of a customer with all the data necessary for invoicing
  • Bill Presentment; in the simplest case by printing out on paper; also through presentation on the Internet (electronic invoice) via secure access

The complexity of billing is mainly due to the following aspects:

  • Variety of billable services (analog and digital telephony, cellular , X.25 , X.400 , Frame Relay , interconnection , ...)
  • heterogeneous network technologies with distributed data sources and very different data structures
  • Diversity of variants and complexity of tariff models with an extremely short time to market
  • Strongly individualized invoice layout, especially in the business customer area
  • privacy

The IT system (billing system) that supports the billing process is therefore quite extensive. It requires a powerful data center environment with, in individual cases, highly fail-safe systems.

Properties of billing systems

Functional properties

  • Complex product hierarchies (each item can be billed)
  • Tariffs can be configured within wide limits without changing the program
  • Complex customer hierarchies (not limited in depth and breadth)
  • Individually definable invoice layout with groupings and aggregations of products and customer hierarchy levels
  • Historical data storage for billing late fees or retroactive orders
  • Compliance with the rules of the Telecommunications Act (especially the data protection requirements)
  • GoB conformity (especially proper storage bookkeeping)
  • Real-time capability of all components (especially for cellular / prepaid)

Technological properties

  • mostly UNIX- based
  • has high throughput rates / performance, can be parallelized for processing high volumes
  • Internal data format similar to XML avoids software changes when billing new services
  • enables the connection of externally developed converters of proprietary data formats of network elements for the purpose of flexibility and independence from the network element manufacturer

Problems with billing

To unjustified billing positions may come when in individual cases of compounds False Answer Supervision occurred.

Billing that is incorrect from the customer's point of view can occur if the numbering plan of a country has been changed, but this change was not stored in the billing system at the same time. Specifically, for example, a call to a country's mobile network is billed even though the connection was actually made to a landline in the country.

Billing and data retention

In countries where data retention is prescribed or permitted, this data is usually recorded in the billing process. As metadata, the billing data completely describes the communication in the network. To reduce the high volume of data, redundant data is eliminated early on. Every telephone call results in two Call Detail Records, one each for the calling and the called subscriber. These two records contain symmetrical data, so one can be discarded.

See also

Web links