Telecommunications billing

Billing ( English for " billing " ) is a business process invoicing in service contracts, in particular the telecommunications market and related fields. The billing includes the steps of the receipt of usage data (eg landline, mobile network or Internet ) to the establishment of the invoice.

A necessary precursor to Billing is in high bandwidth of the services such as health care documentation and coding, which take care of the transmission of narrative prose or weakly structured text into a solid documentation and accounting structure.

Billing process

The process basically consists of the following sub-processes ( bearing in mind that the terms although subject to some common sense, but may vary on individual telecommunications companies and solution providers ):

  • Mediation: collecting the usage data (eg CDR ) in the network
  • Rating: review of a single event (eg, calculating the price of a single phone call)
  • Bill Generation: Summarize priced events and creating an overall account, for example, taking into account discounts
  • Product Management (Product Management ): Management of ads with components (eg Nahgespräch, long-distance call ) with the technical and organizational aspects. Products can also be bundled products (eg ISDN with three terminals, a mailbox and call forwarding )
  • Tariff management ( collective management ): Management of the rules by which the price of a single event or calculated the total bill is formed.

The following processes are required in the environment of the billing

  • Customer Administration ( Customer Data Management ): Creating a client with all the data necessary for billing
  • Bill Presentment (invoice presentation); in the simplest case by printing on paper; by display on the Internet (electronic billing ) via a secure access

The complexity of the billing arises mainly by the following aspects:

  • Number of billable services ( analog and digital telephony, mobile telephony, X.25, X.400, Frame Relay, Interconnection, ... )
  • Heterogeneous network technologies with distributed data sources and very different data structures
  • Variety and complexity of the tariff plans at the same time an extremely short time to market
  • Stark individualiertes invoice layout, especially for business customers
  • Privacy Policy

That the billing process supporting IT system ( billing system ) is therefore quite extensive. It requires a high-performance data center environment with high fail-safe systems in individual cases.

Properties of Billing Systems

Functional properties

  • Complex product hierarchies ( each item billable )
  • Rates can be configured in a wide range 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 of late charges or retroactive orders
  • Compliance with the rules of the Telecommunications Act ( specifically the provisions on data protection )
  • GoB - conformity (especially proper memory accounting )
  • Real -time capability of all components (especially mobile / prepaid )

Technological properties

  • Most UNIX - based
  • Has high throughput / performance, parallelism for the processing of high volumes
  • XML -like internal data format avoids software changes in billing new services
  • Connection allows foreign advanced converter 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 occur when individual compounds in cases of False Answer Supervision occurred.

An incorrect from the customer's billing can occur if the numbering plan of a country has been changed, this change was not equal time stored in the billing system. Specifically, a call is doing, for example, billed to the mobile network of a country, even though the connection is actually made ​​at a fixed line in the country.

Pictures of Telecommunications billing

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