What is the difference between charging and billing

What is rating? Complete Guide to Subscription Billing. Free Download. Try Fusebill For Free. Read More. Ebook Title 1. Ebook Title 2. Download Now. Learn More. Popular Posts. Ready To Get Started? Add Power to. Stripe Braintree Paypal Authorize. For example, in case of a long data download, mediation system will keep sending partial events to the billing system so that billing system keep rating them instead of waiting for event completion, and as soon as customer's credit limit breach, account will be barred and Network element will be informed to terminate the call.

The Rating Engine can automatically check to see if any rating time thresholds, including rating time discount thresholds, have been reached. Rating time thresholds help in protecting operators from lots of revenue loss. For example, a customer may not be willing to pay more than his credit limit, in such a case, it becomes necessary to terminate customer's call as soon as it reaches to credit limit threshold.

If it is required to take rating time action, then it is important to have as much as real time rating as possible. Telecom Billing - Rating Processes Advertisements. Previous Page. Next Page. Previous Page Print Page. Save Close. Dashboard Logout. Open the subscription and switch into the tab ledger entries to add positions. Once the ledger entries are created they will be in the state open.

Open ledger entries are charged automatically once the next period is due. Alternatively you can also charge ledger entries manually by creating a charge for the subscription. Charges can be created via the backend by navigating to the Charges Tab in the subscription.

A charge contains of a planned execution date and a reference. Once the panned execution date is reached all open ledger entries will be charged. Alternatively, you can also create charges via the web service API by using the create operation on the Subscription Charge Service. Charges are normally carried out automatically once the period is finished.

It depends on billing system to billing system how it supports partner's settlement. The netting is done by multiple settlement period for the multiple services, which it supports the same currency in Operator level. This is the process of the reconciliation of invoices coming from an interconnect partner which relate to outgoing CDRs.

Every month interconnect partners exchange their CDRs for reconciliation purpose. It is very common to have discrepancies in the CDRs provided by the two partners. Billing Systems provide reports facilitating reconciliation of incoming and outgoing interconnect CDRs. These reports keep parameters such as call type, destination, cost band, and duration so that these CDRs can be used by both operators to match those parameters and identify missing CDRs.

There may be a situation, when some CDRs are found missing at either of the operators' side. After doing required reconciliation if matter does not settle, then various negotiations happen between the partners, and finally, matter is settled by paying some nominal amount to the impacted interconnect partner. There could be various interconnect call scenarios depending on type of agreement between different operators. Operator A's customer makes national call to Operator B's customer.

In this case operator A will pay some amount to operator B. Operator A's customer makes international call through Operator B, because operator A does not have direct agreement with any international operator. In this case, operator A will pay some amount to operator B and operator B will take care of settling down international operator. Operator A's customer makes international call directly using an international operator.

In this case, operator A will pay some amount to international operator directly. A procedure for resolving discrepancies is useful which often involves seeking recourse to arbitration, the regulator, or to the courts. Operators can have different types of agreements to exchange their traffic. Payment settlement among different partners happens on monthly or bi-monthly basis as per the agreement.

As per this agreement, both the operators can originate and terminate their calls in each other's network. Roaming is the ability for a customer of mobile communications to automatically make and receive telephone calls, send and receive data, or access other services while travelling outside the geographical coverage area of the home network, by means of using a network of another operator.

Roaming can be either national roaming or international roaming. National roaming means that mobile subscribers make use of another network in geographical areas, where their own operator does not have coverage. This is, for example, used by operators, who do not have complete coverage in a country. International roaming is used when mobile subscribers travel abroad and make use of the network of an operator in the foreign country. How does it actually take place?

If a service provider does not have a network coverage in a particular city or country, then this service provider makes a roaming agreement with another service provider having network in that city or country.

As per this agreement, another service provider provides all the available services to the roaming customer of first service provider. CDRs generated in one roaming partner's area are collected and rated by that roaming partner and finally they are sent to the actual service provider of the roaming customer.

Actual service provider charges the end customer for all the roaming services provided based on their predefined service charges. Two roaming partners settle their financials on monthly basis by exchanging actual roaming CDRs and reports based on those CDRs.

The Home Public Mobile Network is the network from the operator by which a mobile subscriber has a subscription.

The Visited Public Mobile Network is the network used by a mobile subscriber while roaming. There are well known bodies like MACH who interface between different roaming partners to help them to exchange their CDRs, setting up roaming agreements and resolving any dispute. Clearing houses receive billing records from one roaming partner for the inbound roamers and submit billing records to another roaming partner for which this roamer would be called outbound roamer.

TAP3 is the latest version of the standard and will enable billing for a host of new services that networks intend to offer their customers. TAP3 defines how and what information on roamed usage must be passed between Network Operators. These files are exchanged using simple FTP connection. There are different versions of TAP. TAP3 is the third specification version of the standard. The files transferred are termed TAP files.

The files transferred are termed RAP files. Mobile subscriber travels to another country and creates usage on the foreign network. In order to bill the subscriber, this information has to be passed back to the subscriber's home network.

The foreign network will collect information on the usage from it's switches, etc. The foreign operator will rate the calls and then charge the subscribers home network for all the calls within a file. The home operator can mark up or re-rate the calls in order to make revenue. A mobile virtual network operator MVNO is a company that provides mobile phone services, but does not have its own licensed frequency allocation of radio spectrum, nor does it necessarily have all of the infrastructure required to provide mobile telephone service.

MVNE stands for Mobile Virtual Network Enabler , which is a company that provides services to mobile virtual network operators such as billing, network element provisioning, administration, operations, support of base station subsystems and operations support systems, and provision of back end network elements, to enable provision of mobile network services like cellular phone connectivity.

An MVNO in reality is a reseller of mobile products and services from an actual operator, but under a different brand. For example, there is an operator A having all the infrastructure including network, switches, billing systems, provisioning system and customer care systems, etc. Now, if someone wants to start a telecom business by doing some minimum investment, then MVNO is the option to proceed. An MVNO will buy services in bulk from a well-established operator and change the brand name as per their convenience and market those products and services as an operator.

Actual operator would remain transparent from the end customer and customer will have feeling like to be an end customer of MVNO. Depending on the situation, an MVNO can buy one or more infrastructure components from an operator and pay them accordingly. For example, an MVNO may like to use only network from the operator or an MVNO can use network and charging system from the operator and rest of the components like customer care, provisioning, etc.

MVNOs typically do not have their own infrastructure, but some leading MVNO's deploy their own mobile IN infrastructure in order to facilitate the means to offer value-added services. MNVO's can treat incumbent infrastructure such as radio equipment as a commodity, while the MVNO offers its own advanced and differentiated services based on exploitation of their own intelligent network infrastructure.

In this way, each MVNO and the network operator could focus on their own niche markets and form customized detailed services that would expand their customer reach and brand. Assuming an incumbent operator sells their infrastructure to an MVNO, there could be different business models and agreements between incumbent and MVNO. Here, a fixed percent of commission will go to the MVNE.

MVNO can buy products and services in bulk at special discounted prices and then brand them with their name and sell in the market. By the end of every month or usually after every two weeks, invoice can be generated and collection can be followed up.

In such a case, MVNO functionality is achieved either using built-in functionality in the pre-paid system or by simply defining a separate service class. All the usage CDRs and other information is dumped into data warehouse from where reports can be generated to prepare invoice. Assume an operator is providing different services mobile voice, fixed voice, data, IPTV, broadband, pre-paid, and post-paid, etc. A customer can have one or more of these services from the same operator.

A typical customer would definitely like to have single invoice and single view of his account. A convergent billing is the integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice and a unified view of the customer.

Customer should call a call center and should get complete account information for all the services opted. Customer receives a single bill and makes a single payment for all the services.

A truly Convergent Billing System should be able to consolidate any number and combination of products and services onto a single bill, regardless of the type of product and market segment, i. Another important parameter contributing in convergent billing is a single product and price catalogue for pre-paid as well as post-paid customers.

Single product and service catalogue gives better time to market and reduced cost of implementation. A unified bill enables cross-service discounts, so that customers who order multiple services can receive preferential pricing. Convergent billing enables multi-service packaging and pricing, whereby existing customers are enticed to add new services and new customers are attracted by innovative service bundles. So far, it has been a dream of all the big telecom operators to achieve true convergence.

These systems are not flexible enough to handle various functionalities required for post-paid customers for example: complex customer hierarchies, CDR re-rating, volume discounts, flexible reporting, roaming charging, interconnect charging, etc. Post paid billing systems like Convergys Infinys or Amdocs Billing Systems are great for post-paid product and services.

These systems are not capable to handle pre-paid traffic and charge the calls in real time. Importantly these systems can not be made highly available because of their base architecture.

Keeping the two above-mentioned constraints together, if we merge both the systems by doing a kind of interfacing between pre-paid and post-paid systems, then it may be possible to achieve a true convergence. Companies like Convergys and Ericsson are working in the same direction to merge the two systems and use required functionalities from both type of systems and make them single Convergent Billing System. Support and maintenance is an integral and the most important part of a telecom operation.

Customer satisfaction directly depends on how efficient and how good support is being provided to them. A customer complains through customer care or call center and then issue flows at different stages. This issue could be related to signals, call drop, voice or data download quality, wrong bill, some dispute, service activation, or termination, etc.

New version of any system comes along with new features to cater new business requirements. This also includes hardware upgrade to maintain system performance and for more storage as well. There are always different levels of support kept in place by the service providers. These levels handle different types of issues depending on their nature and severity. For example, there could be some problems, which can be resolved by simply restarting the phone.

So, an efficient customer care specialist knows about such type of problems and can suggest a solution without escalating the issue usually called a trouble ticket to the next level. These specialists belong to Information Technology IT department, and if they are able to understand the problem, then they can suggest a solution and send the issue back to level 1, otherwise they check the nature of issue to understand if issue is related to network or billing system or provisioning system or hardware, etc.

If issue is escalated to them, then they analyze the problem and try to find out the root cause of the problem. Most of the times, issue will be diagnosed and fixed by third level support because they are highly skilled engineers specialized in their area.

There may be situation, when issue cannot be fixed at 3rd level support because it may be related to core functionality of the system, which is not modifiable by 3rd level support.

In such a case, issue is further escalated to 4th level support. So, if issue is found to be related to the core functionality of billing system, for example, billing system is not able to apply correct discount, then it would be escalated to the billing system vendor, and if issue is related to the core functionality of the provisioning system, then it would be escalated to the provisioning system vendor. Support departments always work with a predefined service level agreement called SLA. These SLAs are defined and kept in place keeping various parameters in mind.

Whether the issue or operational task is directly related to revenue loss or customer satisfaction. Based on such type of parameters, different priorities are defined and assigned to different issues or operational tasks. Operational task could be report generation, invoice generation, database cleanup activities, or backup activities.

Finally, each issue and operational task comes along with an assigned priority and each priority will have associated SLA. For example, if there is a problem in creating customer order, then it would be assumed a high priority issue because it is directly impacting business.

Such type of issues need to be resolved as soon as possible by the assigned department. So, a very tight SLA is defined for high priority issue. SLAs are discussed and finalized with mutual agreement keeping business need on top priority.

Parameters to qualify the nature of the issue whether it is priority 1st issue or 2nd priority issue or 3rd or 4th priority issue. Lower the priority number, higher is the criticality of the issue. SLAs can be defined between different departments, between vendor and operator and between different operators as well in case of interconnection. The following diagram shows a typical architecture of a Billing System. This chapter will give a brief introduction of all the interfacing systems starting from top to bottom.

This is the first system from where a customer order is captured and customer is created into the system. The CRM system keeps customer-related information along with product and services.

The OMOF module is responsible to track order starting from its creation till its completion. Both the architectures are valid and depend on how architect designs the whole setup.

After taking provisioning commands, this system contacts with core network system to activate, deactivate or suspend the services. After a successful provisioning, this system sends a response back to either the Billing System or the CRM system depending on who sent it the last command.

This system is responsible to maintain the life cycle of network identifiers, which starts with available and then flows through different stages like activation, suspend, terminate, quarantine, and again available. Generally, Billing System does not interact with network switches. Network switches are responsible to provide all the services to the end customers based on what services have been provisioned for the customer.

These systems are responsible for controlling calls, data download, SMS transfer, etc. The Mediation System processes all the CDRs and converts them into a format compatible to the downstream system, which is usually a Billing System.

There may be a requirement to filter out all the calls, which are having call duration less than 5 seconds, the best place to filter out such type of calls will be at Mediation System level.

This is a downstream system for the Billing System and usually keeps tons of historical data related to the customers. Billing System dumps various customer information into the DWH system.

This information includes service usage, invoices, payments, discounts and adjustments, etc. All this information is used to generate various types of management reports and for business intelligence and forecast.

DWH system is always meant to work on bulk and huge data, and if there is a need for any small report, then it is always worth to generate it from the billing system directly instead of abusing DWH for a small task.

Billing System interface with this system is used to post all the financial transactions like invoices, payments, and adjustments. This system works like a general ledger for the finance department and gives complete revenue information at any point in time it is required. As such, this is not necessarily a complete system, but it could be a kind of custom component, which sits in between the Billing System and different payment channels like banks, credit card gateway, shops, and retailers, etc.

All the payment channels use payment gateway to post payments to the billing system to settle down customer invoices. The API can be used by any external resource to post the payment.

Telecom Billing - Quick Guide Advertisements. Previous Page. Next Page. Previous Page Print Page. Save Close. Dashboard Logout. Initiation bill Normally, only requested as the first bill on an account. Periodic bill Produced at regular intervals. Includes all periodic charges, events, and adjustments. Interim bill An extra bill that contains charges due to events processed for the account since the last bill. Suspension bill Sent when an account has been suspended.

Final bill Sent when an account has been terminated to bill all outstanding charges that are due. Post-final bill Sent when a terminated account has receivables outstanding after the production of a final bill. Credit note An extra bill that contains all adjustments in the customer's favor generated since the last bill. Summary Statements A summary statement can be produced for a customer-driven billing hierarchy.

Revenue Classification reports that summarize revenue information for a specific date range by credit class, customer details, price plan, charge type, etc. Customer Details, Aged Receivables, and Open Item reports that are provided primarily to assist with the collections chasing.

Daybook reports summarizing the activities of the day and presenting general ledger information. Total number of accounts breaching their credit limit on daily basis and how much revenue is going in credit breach.