Telecom Billing: Telecom Billing and Accounting- PAGE-2

Invoicing is one of the most important aspects of running your business. So take the time to get it right. Your cash flow will be much healthier as a result and less customer's complains.

Pre-check, Why ?

Every telecom industry are always trying to find ways to cut telecom expenses, keep the bill free from errors so that excess or short billing could be avoided. Telecom bill check can help in the reduction of your out of control fraud. A without pre-check can result in short or excess charging, leading to inviting avoidable complaints from customers. A short billing always led to loss of revenue and excess billing always lead to customer’s dissatisfaction and grievances. A without pre-check is also results in invoices falling in error. Invoices falling in error means loss of revenue for short period, but it consumes a lot of time and delayed in recoveries of revenue.

You might be surprised that so often invoices are going totally unchecked, month after month. An organization receives invoices each month – and if the amount due is within a certain percentage of the previous month’s invoice, it is paid automatically and without question.

A Telecom bill check focuses on saving your company’s revenue through a comprehensive and on-going audit. The service can be utilized in both public and private businesses. Even smaller individually owned establishment can benefit from the telecom bill check service. A Telecom bill check focuses on saving the company from major Fraud or scam. The skilled auditors will go through your existing contracts and telecom billing. These invoices often are thousands of pages of data with coded details and different prices programs for various services. Line by line, they can be overwhelming (which is why so often they go totally unchecked). Having an analysis of the bill will help to ensure your company is being billed accurately.

If a billing error is discovered, the telecom bill check service will immediately follow up the error with the provider and request a credit on your behalf. Therefore, every telecom industry preferably mans the pre-check process with skilled and experienced Commerce Engineers.

Abbreviation used :

Associating Rate Plans to Price Plans

– Rate plans for event generating products must be associated to the price plan

– You can associate multiple rate plans to a price plan

– Rate plans are

• Made available via the tax status and rate plan tab of the Add Price plan dialog box

• Only available if the billing catalog is linked to a rating catalog

Practice

– Creating a Design Catalog

– Creating the Root Price Plan

– Linking the Billing Catalog

to the Rating Catalog

– Adding Rate Plans to the

Root Price Plan

Tariff Charge Details

– Charging options:

• Pro-rateable

• Refundable

• Tracking of price changes

• Marginal

– Charges can be monthly, quarterly, weekly etc

– Charges can be in arrears or advance

Charge Types

• Infinys Rating and Billing supports standard and suspension charge types:

– Initiation — on product installation/initiation

– Periodic — every charge period

– Final — on product termination

– Suspension

– Suspension periodic

– Reactivation

• Revenue Codes

– Revenue codes allow accurate financial reporting, for example, you can distinguish between product charges (revenue gained) and discounts (revenue lost)

– You must set up revenue codes for:

• Standard charges

• Suspension charges

• Override charges

• Discounts

• Package prices

• Receivable Classes

-- Receivable classes provide flexibility in payment allocation:

– Allow payments within a bill to be prioritized

– Maintained using System Configuration

– Associated with prices using Billing Catalog Maintenance

• Practice

– Adding Standard Charges

– Adding Suspension Charges

– Adding Loyalty Points

– Saving the Product Prices

– Creating a Child Price Plan

– Modifying Inherited Prices

in the Child Price Plan

Discounts

• A variation in the price of products and/or events that can be offered to customers like Free Calls

• All Discounts alter the price to be paid for a set of events and/or products

• A discount can relate to product/subscriptions, event or both

Require both assessment rules and discounting rules

Event and Product Discounts

• Discounts are:

– Created as part of the price plan

– Calculated at rating time (event discounts only) or billing time

– Applied as a percentage or an absolute amount

• Discount Calculations Method

Discount can be Calculated during either the rating process or the billing process

There are number of ways in which customer can be given a discount

. Standard Discount

Alter price to be paid by either a percentage or monetary amount

. Rating Time Discount

Alter event price while rating that event CDR

. Pre - Itemization Discount

This discount is given at billing time before itemization

. Post - Itemization Discount

This discount is given at billing time after itemization

Configuration Data Transfer

It is the User application that is used to :

Import/export configuration data between Geneva instances i.e Production and Testing

Maintain both a live and a test system.

Main functionality:

Creation of table sets (sets of data tables for import/export).

Import/export of table sets.

Configuration Data transfer is handled with backend script also

3.2. RATING PROCESS

RATING PROCESS

Rating Process includes importing the Event file from the predefined directory to the managed file area by using Managed File Importer (FID). It includes creating the Rating Engine to rate the imported files and later on insert the successful rated records, duplicate and rejected records in there respective tables in the database.

The Rating process covers the Event Detail record(EDR)/Event file from the time it enters the IRB Billing system until it is rated by the IRB Rating Engine. This means that the Rating process consists of many processes which includes IRB as well as custom processes.

The following is the list of processes that takes place during the Rating process:

1. Mediation - Performs the File Transfer Process (FTP) of the control and event files into the IRB system.

2. FID Processing - FID reads the control files and creates Geneva Managed Files (GMF).

3. Task Master(TM) - Reads the jobs to be run.

4. Rating Process –

Rating Engine (RATE) reads the events from the GMF file.

• RATE creates the following events:

Costed events(Event that has a basic cost calculated for it. It is also known

as a rated event.)

Rejected events (Events that cannot be rated)

Duplicate events (A duplicate event is defined as any unbilled event that relates to another unbilled event in all of the ways like If Account Numbers, Event Sources, Event Type IDs, Cost Center IDs, event dates and time are identical)

The screenshot for the Rating Process is given below:

The Rating Process consists of 3 distinct activities:

Activity A: Transferring EDR / Event files into the Billing system from mediation

Activity B: Importing the EDR files into the IRB Managed Area by FID

RATING –Process Flow

Process flow is a set of steps and an order for performing the process steps to produce a desired result. This section provides the details on how to handle various scenarios that might occur in the Rating process. Rating Process includes the following processes:

1. Check transferred files from the Mediation system

2. Start / Stop FID

3. Check for FID Success

4. Check for FID Failures

5. Check for FID created jobs

6. Increase / Decrease FID parallelism

7. Start/ Stop RATE

8. Check for RATE Success

9. Check for Rejected events

10. Check for Duplicate events

11. Unload Events

12. Check for logs

13. Check if the Rating processes are running or not

14. Rejected Event Maintenance

MANUAL RATING PROCESS

The Event and control files coming from the switches are dumped by Mediation at the following path:

/wp01irb1_irbapp/irbwprod/import/cdr/mediation/'folder name'

‘FOLDER NAME' - Name of the folder in MEDIATION where the data to be rated is present.

The process takes place in the following steps:

Checking Count of Event and Control Files:

For checking the count of event & control files, and total count of CDR's for the particular SSA use these commands:

Count of event files:

ls -l|grep event|wc -l

.Count of control files:

ls -l|grep control|wc –l

Count of CDR's

cat eve*|grep 'Event'|wc –l

Taking Backup of Data

After the FID process is run, the data is copied into GMF. So for safety purpose we take backup of event and control files.

The backup should be taken at the following path:

/WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/import/CDR_backup/'FOLDER NAME'/'DATE‘

FOLDER NAME - Name of SSA whose data is going to be rated.

DATE - Create a new folder with the name of current date.

1.Run FID on the data

Prerequisite for FID process:

 Event files and control files transfer should be completed before executing FID.

 The count of event and control files should be same i.e there should be a corresponding control file for every event file.

Run FID command on the specified folder. The command is as follows:

FID -a " -sourceDir <path>“

FID can be run from any path.For e.g:

FID -a " -sourceDir /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/import/CDR/MEDIATION/KALYAN“

After FID is run, a GMF gets created for every event file on which FID is run. The GMF is present at the following path:

/WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/mf/geneva_admin/default/’current date’

2.Run RATE Process

Prerequisites for RATE process:

RATE process for rating the rejected events should not be running.The event and control files should be imported by FID i.e rating jobs must be present in job table with process status ‘waiting to be processed’

After FID is completed on all the folders that are to be rated, run the RATE command. Rating Engine (RATE) checks the jobs with status Waiting to be processed for rating in JOB table and starts rating the events for the identified files.

Go to the following path:

/WP01IRB1_irbapp/OPERATIONS/WEST_LOGS

RATE must always be run at this path only.

RATE can be run using single command, as follows :

nohupRATE -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/RMFP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" >file name.txt &

If more than one instance of RATE is to be run, set the thread count as shown below:

nohupRATE-c 1 -t 3 -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/RMFP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" >file name1.txt &

nohupRATE-c 2 -t 3 -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/RMFP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" >file name2.txt &

MONITORING RATING PROCESS

Even though rating process has been automated, it is necessary to monitor the process to ensure that it is running correctly and it does not abort or fail due to any reason.

Rating & FID Logs :The Rating and FID logs are present on billing server at the path: /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/LOGS/eventlog/[current date]

Open the log file using the command: cat log file name

Check the last line in the log file.

There could be three cases:

Process finishing with status 0

Means the process got completed without any error.

Process finishing with status 1

The process got aborted because of some reason. In case of FID, this happens when there is a problem in the format of event or control file (‘More than 1 lexeme found’ error). The error file is to be given to mediation team for correction and reprocessing.

Process finishing with status 8

The process got completed but with some errors. In case of RATE, whenever a CDR is rejected log file will show this message.

Checking for duplicate events

The duplicate events are written to the IRB table – REJECTEVENT, under the column REJECT_CODE as RATE-19001.

Unloading the events

There are several situations in which it is necessary to undo the rating/loading

of events. For example, when the same file of events is present twice and identified as different files ,An error in the rate plan used has resulted in incorrectly priced events,The events were loaded against the wrong account (due to incorrect event source registration)A re-rate request is initiated

Note: The Event Unloader is an IRB system process that provides a mechanism for unloading events.The process is started from the command line as:

$> CEU arguments [arguments]

For example, CEU -a "-S -G -a <account_num>“

Rejected Event Maintenance

.If an event cannot be costed, it is treated as a rejected event and stored in the REJECTEVENT table. Rejected events can be examined, corrected, and resubmitted by using the Rejected Event Maintenance.

Note: Rejected Event Maintenance is the GUI from IRB to modify the events and resubmit them for rating. Rejected Event Input plug-in processes the events modified through Rejected Event Maintenance.

The purpose of the Rejected Event Input Plug-In is to resubmit the rejected events with the rejected status to the active rating engine. RATE process when run with this Input plug-in, will rate the modified events.

The command for this is:

nohup RATE -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/REIP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" > test_4 &

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3.3 BILLING PROCESS

Billing process is the process of calculations of related data for preparation of bills to customers and it relates to the revenue for the telecom services provided to the Customers. Therefore, every telecom industry tries to set their billing mechanism efficient enough that it will have not revenue leakage.

Billing process identifies the accounts that are due for billing, runs the billing engine, runs the Bill Data Writer to generate bill data Geneva Managed File(.gmf) extension.

Billing process is the process, collecting the usage from various system or switches or exchanges in the form of debit or credit (payment), aggregating it, applying required charges or tariff plan of customer and finally generating the bill image for invoices for the customers. Telecom Billing process also includes receiving and recording payments from the customers. This tutorial gives you a complete understanding on Telecom Billing.

Billing systems are often viewed as accounts receivable, as the billing system assists in the collection of revenue money from customers by invoice for the services. Billing systems are also part of accounts payable (for inter-carrier settlements), as customers often use services from other companies through inter connectivity network such as wireless roaming, long distance, and call completion through other networks. So, Billing system maintain the records of accounts receivable as well as accounts payable.

Billing systems has to handle the following a list of most important features −

Rating & billing − It involves rating the products or services usage and producing monthly bills.

Payment processing − It involves posting of the customer's payments into his/her account.

Credit control and collections − It involves chasing the outstanding payments and taking appropriate actions to collect the payments.

Disputes and adjustments − It involves recording customer's disputes against their bills and creating adjustment to refund the disputed amount in order to settle the disputes.

Pre-pay and post-pay services − It involves supporting both the pre-paid and the post-paid customer bases.

Multilingual & multiple currencies − Multilingual and multiple currencies support is required if the business is spread across the globe and have multinational customers or else if the government regulations demand for it.

Inter-carrier settlements − It involve sharing of revenue between carriers that provide services to each other's customers.

Products & services − This involves providing flexible way to maintain various products and services and sell them individually or in packages.

Discount applications − This involves defining various discount schemes in order to reduce customer churn and attract and increase customer base.

Billing Types

billing types are determined based on revenue accounting and source of billing types −

Pre-pay Billing − A billing mechanism where customer pays in advance and after that starts using a service. Usually, prepaid customers do not receive any invoice and they are charged in real time by the highly available billing systems called 'IN'(Intelligent Network).

Post-pay Billing − This is the conventional billing, which is coming for many years. Here, customers buy products and services and use them throughout the month, and by end of the month, invoices are generated by the service provider and sent those invoices to the customers to make their due payment.

Interconnect Billing: The network operator is usually financially responsible for services provided to its customers by other networks regardless of whether or not the customer pays for the service. Interconnect billing is related to inter-carrier or sometime called partner settlements.

Corporate Billing : Keeping in view of customer's demand and revenue collection, a new bill type has been introduced for Corporate Customers or Customer of creamy layers. In Corporate Billing, a single Parent bill is issued to the customer, attaching all child accounts to Parent Account, so that customer could draw a single cheque for payment.

Corporate Billing facilities - Factures of ES bill

1. Single Bill for group of accounts as required of Corporate Customers.

2. Single payment on Parent account for all individual Accounts.

3. Appling discount to all individual as per policy and conditions.

4. Any time addition and deletion of HBS from parent without effecting services.

Roaming Charges − When a customer goes from one network operator's coverage area to another operator's coverage area, the first operator would pay marginal charges to the second operator to provide services to their customers. Such type of charges are settled through roaming billing. This settlement is done as per TAP3 protocol, which we will discuss in the upcoming chapters.

Convergent Billing − Convergent billing is the integration of all service charges onto a single customer invoice. Convergent billing means creating a unified view of the customer and all services (Mobile, Fixed, IP, etc.,) provided to that customer, Appling discount to all individual as per policy and conditions.

Bill Types

Infinys Rating and Billing can bill any combination of different products and services, whether or not they are related. They may be billed on a single, convergent bill, or on separate bills depending on the Infinys operator’s (and the customer’s) preference.

Infinys Rating and Billing produces the following bill types:

Bills are produced either automatically, or on request. The following bill type is produced automatically by Infinys Rating and Billing:

􀁹 Periodic bills :

The following bill types have to be manually requested via the Account Billing view of

Customer Account Maintenance:

􀁹 Initiation bill

􀁹 Interim bill

􀁹 Post-final bill

􀁹 Credit note bill

Initiation bill Normally only requested as the first bill on an account.

Includes product charges and adjustments, but no events.

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. Includes all events and adjustments, but no periodic charges.

Suspension bill Sent when an account has been suspended. Includes all

periodic charges, events, and adjustments.

Final bill Sent when an account has been terminated to bill all outstanding charges that are due. Includes all periodic charges, events, and adjustments, along with any refunds, for example, the return of a deposit.

Post-final bill Sent when a terminated account has receivables

outstanding after the production of a final bill. Includes any

post-termination events and adjustments, but no periodic

charges.

Credit note : An extra bill that contains all adjustments in the customer’s

favor generated since the last bill.

Bill Requests :

All of the bill requests that have been produced for an account are displayed and managed on the Bill Requests tab of the Account Billing view of Customer Account Maintenance.

Bill requests are listed in reverse date order; that is, most recent first, and the currently selected bill request is highlighted. However, if no bill requests exist, the table is blank.

The bill requests are color-coded according to their status and a color key is given in the bottom left corner of the tab.

You can add requests, view request details, and delete bill requests on the Bill Requests tab.

Bill requests cannot be added to accounts that:

􀁹 Have a bill that is pending cancellation or has been canceled.

􀁹 Are currently suspended.

Periodic Bills

Periodic bills are bills that are produced at regular intervals, such as monthly or three monthly, depending on the bill period specified for the account.

This can be configured via the Billing Details tab in the Billing Details dialog box. This in turn is accessed via the Billing tab in the Details for account dialog box of Customer Account Maintenance.

Billing can be synchronized with a particular date (for example, always bill from the 5th of the month to the 4th inclusive) or with the next bill date for the account.

By default, the Billing Engine attempts to produce periodic bills for all accounts where all of the following apply:

 A periodic bill is due.

Ÿ The ACCOUNT_STATUS column in the ACCOUNTSTATUS table is set to one of the following:

o OK – live/active

o TA – awaiting final bill

In Customer Account Maintenance, the account

status is viewed on the Account tab in the Details

for account dialog box. Refer to Infinys Rating and

Billing Customer Account Maintenance Help for

more information.

Ÿ The BILLING_STATUS column in the ACCOUNT table is set to one of the following:

o OK – billable

o OV – override exceptional bill on next run

o RR – rebill requested

o XY (under certain conditions) – billing has failed for another account in the bill hierarchy

In Customer Account Maintenance, the billing status is viewed on the Finance tab in the Details for account dialog box. Refer to Infinys Rating and Billing Customer Account Maintenance Help for more information.

Infinys Rating and Billing bills customer accounts according to the bill period of the account. When an account becomes billable, the Billing Engine accesses all information related to that account and generates an invoice. At the same time, Infinys Rating and Billing produces a statement for the account and outputs this information in a section of the bill data.

The system parameters SYSproductStartMargin and SYSproductEndMargin can be used to enable the Billing Engine to locate the event source for an event if the event date and time falls just outside the event source’s date range (specified by the START_DTM and END_DTM columns in the CUSTEVENTSOURCE table). These system parameters, in effect, extend the date range by a specified amount. Refer to the Infinys Rating and Billing System Parameters Interactive for more information.

The date range extension can also cause the event date and time to fall within the date range of more than one event source. In this case, the system parameter RATEproductMarginsOverlap determines the behavior of the Billing Engine:

 If set to NEAREST, the Billing Engine selects the event source in the CUSTEVENTSOURCE table that is closest to the event date and time.

 If set to NEXT, the Billing Engine selects the event source in the CUSTEVENTSOURCE table that is next, that is, just after the event date and time.

 If set to OFF, the Billing Engine behaves as if the system parameter were set to NEAREST.

 If set to PREVIOUS, the Billing Engine selects the event source in the CUSTEVENTSOURCE table that is just before the event date and time.

Refer to the Infinys Rating and Billing System Parameters Interactive for more information.

If the account is owned by a customer using customer hierarchy billing, then all accounts within the hierarchy are billed at the same time as the root of the hierarchy.

Refer to Infinys Rating and Billing Customer Account Maintenance Help for more information on how to configure billing details.

Interim Bills

Sometimes it is desirable to produce extra bills for specific accounts at times between the normal periodic bills. For example, a customer may request an extra bill to check the usage on his or her phone or the Infinys operator may want to send extra bills to customers who have such high usage that they have exceeded their credit limits. These extra non-periodic bills are initiated by creating a bill request.

Interim bills do not alter the generation of periodic bills. The next periodic bill still occurs on the expected date according to the customer’s billing day.

Final and Post-Final Bills

Final bills are bills that are requested when an account is terminated to bill all outstanding charges that are due. Post-final bills are extra bills produced to cover receivables which appear unexpectedly on accounts that have already had final bills produced.

To produce final bills the BGterminationBillDays system parameter is used to specify the number of days after account termination that a final bill is produced. The value entered should be set to an integer of one or above. If not set (that is, is set to null), no final bill is produced when the account is terminated and the Infinys operator has to produce a final bill manually, if they choose.

After the Billing Engine produces a final bill for an account, it changes that account’s status from Awaiting Termination (TA) to Terminated (TX). This can be viewed via the Account status field of the Account tab in the Details for account dialog box of Customer Account Maintenance. The Billing Engine does not bill terminated accounts unless a post-final bill is requested.

Post-final bills may be requested if events arrive for a terminated account (perhaps due to delays in mediation). Post-final bills have the same content as interim bills and are the only bills that can be requested for terminated accounts.

Post-final bills can only be requested for terminated accounts (see "Account Status" for details) which have already had a final bill (that is, have an account status of Terminated). Post-final bills are used if the decision has been made to chase receivables outstanding on an account after the issue of a final bill.

If the optional system parameter BGignoreCondsForTermBillsBoo is set to T (true) then the following fields in the EXCEPTIONALBILLCONDITIONS table are ignored when deciding whether or not a bill is exceptional:

 MINIMUM_BILL_MNY

 MIN_NEG_BILL_MNY

 MAX_NEG_BILL_MNY

 INCREMENT_BILL_DATE_BOO

This is the case for final, post-final, and suspension bills.

If the BGignoreCondsForTermBillsBoo system parameter is set to F (false) then the fields listed above are used when deciding whether or not a bill is exceptional.

Products Attributes

Products are items that customers can either buy outright or lease. Products can be:

v Physical objects (a mobile phone, for example).

v Services (a call waiting service on a telephone system, for example).

v More abstract entities (a service level agreement, for example).

v Related products can be grouped together into a product family.

v You can define products as either parent or child products:

v A parent product has no dependencies and can be purchased by itself.

v A child product cannot be purchased unless the parent product is also purchased.

A product can be both a parent and a child at the same time, therefore allowing multiple

levels of products. In addition, each product family can have more than one root product if

required.

The following sections provide an overview of the steps required to create a family of

products. Once you add a product, you can define attributes, event types, and tax

information for the product.

Some products generate events (for example, a telephone line rental product generates

telephone call events). Multiple event sources can be listed for a product (for example,

one product can be sold that consists of two mobile handsets with combined talk time).

A product can have a number of attributes associated with them. Product attributes allow information about individual product instances to be held where the relevant information differs between types of product.

Examples of product attributes :

A mobile telephone can have product attributes describing its make and model, its mobile

subscriber international standard dialing number (MSISDN), and its international mobile

subscriber identity (IMSI). Similarly, In Landline phone, product can have a product attribute

of having accessories and apparatus.

Creating Product Attributes

You can retrieve the values for certain product attributes from an external system such as

an inventory management system. Product Configuration allows you to configure how

such data (called breakout data) is obtained.

To create a product attribute:

1 On the Product Configuration main window, select the product in the hierarchy.

The tab windows display the product details.

2 Click the Attributes tab, and then click Add to add the required attributes for the product.

Product Configuration

User application that is used to define:

Products

Product families

Subscription types

Landline Services/

ISDN Services/

WLL Services/

Broadband Services/

FTTH-Voice Services /

FTTH-BB Services /

DSPT Services/

IN Services product families along with child products configured in our system.

Event-Generating Products

Products can be either:

Event generating

Non-event generating

Event-generating products:

Must have at least one appropriate event type assigned to them

Subscriptions and Subscription Types

A subscription is:

A group of products and/or packages that can be treated as a single unit

Charged independently of the products and packages it contains

A subscription type is:

The entity that comes with charges

Configurable for each installation — Subscription Types view in Product Configuration

Subscription Pricing

A subscription family contains subscription types (configurable in Product Configuration)

A price plan is associated with a subscription family

Prices are configured for subscription types within a price plan

Billing Catalog Maintenance is used to define price plans that can be used for subscription charges

Billing Catalogue Definition

A billing Catalogue is used to define:

Charges in a specific pricing currency for products, packages, and subscriptions

Other information relating to discounts, bonus schemes, payment methods, budget payment plans, and loyalty points

Billing catalogues are created and updated using Billing Catalog Maintenance

Rating and Rating Catalogue

Rating:

Guides each event to the billable account

Calculates costs for individual events

Is carried out by the Active Rating Engine

Rating catalog:

Holds the set of rules that allows the Active Rating Engine to price events

Billing Catalogues – Configuring Tariff Plans

Billing catalog items:

Configuring Tariff Price plans

Configuring Rating and billing time discounts

Configuring Overriding charges

Configuring Various Schemes

Mapping Revenue code and Receivable class to every Tariff plan/Discount /Schemes.

Configuring Tariff Plans

Price plans must have a tax status defined:

Tax exclusive — tax is added to product prices by the Billing Engine

Tax inclusive — tax amount is included in product prices and the Billing Engine “back calculates” to give net of tax amount

The values you enter for product prices must take account of the tax status

Associating Rate Plans to Price Plans

Rate plans for event generating products must be associated to the price plan

You can associate multiple rate plans to a price plan

Rate plans are

Made available via the tax status and rate plan tab of the Add Price plan dialog box

Only available if the billing catalog is linked to a rating catalog

Tariff Charge Details

Charging options:

Pro-rateable

Refundable

Tracking of price changes

Marginal

Charges can be monthly, quarterly, weekly etc

Charges can be in arrears or advance

Charge Types

Infinys Rating and Billing supports standard and suspension charge types:

Initiation — on product installation/initiation

Periodic — every charge period

Final — on product termination

Suspension

Suspension periodic

Reactivation

Product Initiation Charges − There are several one time charges taken from customer, as per tariff policy in the form of - installation, activation, service re-connection or Sim card change or plan change etc.,.

Product Re-activation Charges - If product is suspended due to some tariff policy, then on re-activation of services, re-activation charges are applied for this service.

Product Periodic Charges − These are the charges, levied in the customer's bill towards monthly or bi-monthly or Quarterly or six monthly or yearly basis as a rental of the product.

Product Termination Charges − These are the charges, recovered from customers on termination of the product and service.

Product Suspension Charges − These are the charges, which can be applied if a product is suspended because of some reason; for example, non-payment.

Product Suspension Periodic Charges − There are some charges recovered from customer periodically even if a customer is suspended.

Refundable & Non-Refundable Charges:

Some telecom operators have some pre-determined tariff policy, in accordance which connection booking charges are recovered in advance of Services are to be initiated. On installation or initiation of Services, Booking charges are transferred to the customer's account as Security Deposit and retained as refundable on surrender of connection.

If prices were configured as non-refundable, then they would not be refunded to the customer, but if they were configured as refundable, then they would be refunded to the customer. Second rule, if prices were configured as pro-ratable, then they would be refunded based on pro-ration, otherwise they would be refunded as a whole

Revenue Codes

Revenue codes allow accurate financial reporting, for example, you can distinguish between product charges (revenue gained) and discounts (revenue lost)

You must set up revenue codes for:

Standard charges

Suspension charges

Override charges

Discounts

Package prices

Receivable classes

Receivable classes provide flexibility in payment allocation:

Allow payments within a bill to be prioritized

Maintained using System Configuration

Associated with prices using Billing Catalog Maintenance

Discounts

A variation in the price of products and/or events that can be offered to customers like Free Calls

All Discounts alter the price to be paid for a set of events and/or products

A discount

Can relate to product/subscriptions, event or both

Require both assessment rules and discounting rules

Event and Product Discounts

Discounts are:

Created as part of the price plan

Calculated at rating time (event discounts only) or billing time

Applied as a percentage or an absolute amount

Discount Calculations Method

Discount can be Calculated during either the rating process or the billing process

There are number of ways in which customer can be given a discount

Standard Discount

Alter price to be paid by either a percentage or monetary amount

Rating Time Discount

Alter event price while rating that event CDR

Pre - Itemization Discount

This discount is given at billing time before itemization

Post - Itemization Discount

This discount is given at billing time after itemization

Configuration Data Transfer

It is the User application that is used to :

Import/export configuration data between Geneva instances i.e Production and Testing

Maintain both a live and a test system.

Main functionality:

Creation of table sets (sets of data tables for import/export).

Import/export of table sets.

Configuration Data transfer is handled with backend script also

Discount Stages and Thresholds:

Discount can be Calculated during either the rating process or the billing process and can be set thresholds and stages for the type of discounts. Discount steps will allow the size of the discount to be changed when particular thresholds are reached, irrespective of the stage, either at the time of rating or billing process or while payments. Each discount will have n number of steps will be added if the discount is necessary to become more attractive or favorable to the customers.

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Postpaid V/s prepaid connection

Telecom operators provide two options to their customers, to go for a postpaid or a prepaid connection.

Most of the telecom operators do not prefer post paid Services, as it is harmful to the business and it gives full scope to the customer to default at any time. Postpaid has an advantage you need to pay the bill after you have used the service. Post paid service is set on the credit of deposits, if it is crossing over the deposit limit, the post paid services will be disconnected. It is a convenience in comparison to prepaid where your phone will just stop working on your prepaid pack or balance gets over. You get a few days in post paid service, even after your due bill date to pay the bill. Changing a plan can also lead to a very high bill due to pro-rata charging. A complexity is created in calculation of rated evets or discounts on pro-rata basis, resulting into over charging or under-charging in the bill. Lack of Postpaid doesn’t allow you to keep tight control on the expenses, you get the bill after a month, though can track the bill from operator App and other means but at times you can incur charges which can lead to additional bills. As per TRAI guidelines in India, MNP is difficult for Postpaid. So, it is required customers to covert into pre-paid plan for MNP.

Service Payments: Pre-paid customers make payment in advance of using the service, whereas post-paid customers use the services throughout of the month, as per billing period. At the end of the billing month, bill for the customer is processed collecting all billable data and dispatched with due date of 15 days for payment. Post-paid customer can made payment in advance of bill is to be processed. Pre-paid customer can not get the services without advance payment or re-charge, while Post-paid customer can enjoy the services, without payment up to the due date of preceding bill.

Service Offerings : Post-paid billing systems provide more efficient and accurate in comparison real time charging in pre-paid billing. Post-paid billing systems, has so many stages ahead of billing plan for the billing cycle and billing group get an adequate time to pre-check the bills processed, before dispatch to the customer, while calling events are to be calculated in real time, immediately after a call is over. Some data plans come with unlimited talk and text

Under pre-paid billing system, the purchased credit is used to pay for telecommunications services at the point the service is accessed or consumed. If there is no credit, then access is denied by the mobile network.

For example, real time charging system is not flexible to maintain a complex business customers' hierarchy, where as a post-paid billing system can handle a customer hierarchy up to N level.

Support & Maintenance − An operator needs to give same at tention to both the businesses. If, for a pre-paid business, operator needs to have skilled manpower to control the operation, same time operator needs a great staff to handle post-paid customer's queries related to their charging, bills, and fixing operational issues.

Supported Network − A long time ago, the network of the prepaid and the postpaid connections were different. This used to invoke complaints that the prepaid connection would offer better connectivity than the postpaid or vice versa. This is the age of convergent billing and operators are running their business with the same network without compromising communication quali

Invoicing is one of the most important aspects of running your business. So take the time to get it right. Your cash flow will be much healthier as a result and less customer's complains.

Pre-check, Why ?

Abbreviation used :

Associating Rate Plans to Price Plans

– Rate plans for event generating products must be associated to the price plan

– You can associate multiple rate plans to a price plan

– Rate plans are

• Made available via the tax status and rate plan tab of the Add Price plan dialog box

• Only available if the billing catalog is linked to a rating catalog

Practice

– Creating a Design Catalog

– Creating the Root Price Plan

– Linking the Billing Catalog

to the Rating Catalog

– Adding Rate Plans to the

Root Price Plan

Tariff Charge Details

– Charging options:

• Pro-rateable

• Refundable

• Tracking of price changes

• Marginal

– Charges can be monthly, quarterly, weekly etc

– Charges can be in arrears or advance

Charge Types

• Infinys Rating and Billing supports standard and suspension charge types:

– Initiation — on product installation/initiation

– Periodic — every charge period

– Final — on product termination

– Suspension

– Suspension periodic

– Reactivation

• Revenue Codes

– Revenue codes allow accurate financial reporting, for example, you can distinguish between product charges (revenue gained) and discounts (revenue lost)

– You must set up revenue codes for:

• Standard charges

• Suspension charges

• Override charges

• Discounts

• Package prices

• Receivable Classes

- Receivable classes provide flexibility in payment allocation:

– Allow payments within a bill to be prioritized

– Maintained using System Configuration

– Associated with prices using Billing Catalog Maintenance

• Practice

– Adding Standard Charges

– Adding Suspension Charges

– Adding Loyalty Points

– Saving the Product Prices

– Creating a Child Price Plan

– Modifying Inherited Prices

in the Child Price Plan

Discounts

• A variation in the price of products and/or events that can be offered to customers like Free Calls

• All Discounts alter the price to be paid for a set of events and/or products

• A discount can relate to product/subscriptions, event or both

Require both assessment rules and discounting rules

Event and Product Discounts

• Discounts are:

– Created as part of the price plan

– Calculated at rating time (event discounts only) or billing time

– Applied as a percentage or an absolute amount

• Discount Calculations Method

Discount can be Calculated during either the rating process or the billing process

There are number of ways in which customer can be given a discount

. Standard Discount

Alter price to be paid by either a percentage or monetary amount

. Rating Time Discount

Alter event price while rating that event CDR

. Pre - Itemization Discount

This discount is given at billing time before itemization

. Post - Itemization Discount

This discount is given at billing time after itemization

Configuration Data Transfer

It is the User application that is used to :

Import/export configuration data between Geneva instances i.e Production and Testing

Maintain both a live and a test system.

Main functionality:

Creation of table sets (sets of data tables for import/export).

Import/export of table sets.

Configuration Data transfer is handled with backend script also

3.2. RATING PROCESS

RATING PROCESS

The following is the list of processes that takes place during the Rating process:

1. Mediation - Performs the File Transfer Process (FTP) of the control and event files into the IRB system.

2. FID Processing - FID reads the control files and creates Geneva Managed Files (GMF).

3. Task Master(TM) - Reads the jobs to be run.

4. Rating Process –

Rating Engine (RATE) reads the events from the GMF file.

• RATE creates the following events:

Costed events(Event that has a basic cost calculated for it. It is also known

as a rated event.)

Rejected events (Events that cannot be rated)

The screenshot for the Rating Process is given below:

The Rating Process consists of 3 distinct activities:

Activity A: Transferring EDR / Event files into the Billing system from mediation

Activity B: Importing the EDR files into the IRB Managed Area by FID

RATING –Process Flow

1. Check transferred files from the Mediation system

2. Start / Stop FID

3. Check for FID Success

4. Check for FID Failures

5. Check for FID created jobs

6. Increase / Decrease FID parallelism

7. Start/ Stop RATE

8. Check for RATE Success

9. Check for Rejected events

10. Check for Duplicate events

11. Unload Events

12. Check for logs

13. Check if the Rating processes are running or not

14. Rejected Event Maintenance

MANUAL RATING PROCESS

The Event and control files coming from the switches are dumped by Mediation at the following path:

/wp01irb1_irbapp/irbwprod/import/cdr/mediation/'folder name'

‘FOLDER NAME' - Name of the folder in MEDIATION where the data to be rated is present.

The process takes place in the following steps:

Checking Count of Event and Control Files:

For checking the count of event & control files, and total count of CDR's for the particular SSA use these commands:

Count of event files:

ls -l|grep event|wc -l

.Count of control files:

ls -l|grep control|wc –l

Count of CDR's

cat eve*|grep 'Event'|wc –l

Taking Backup of Data

After the FID process is run, the data is copied into GMF. So for safety purpose we take backup of event and control files.

The backup should be taken at the following path:

/WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/import/CDR_backup/'FOLDER NAME'/'DATE‘

FOLDER NAME - Name of SSA whose data is going to be rated.

DATE - Create a new folder with the name of current date.

1.Run FID on the data

Prerequisite for FID process:

 Event files and control files transfer should be completed before executing FID.

 The count of event and control files should be same i.e there should be a corresponding control file for every event file.

Run FID command on the specified folder. The command is as follows:

FID -a " -sourceDir <path>“

FID can be run from any path.For e.g:

FID -a " -sourceDir /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/import/CDR/MEDIATION/KALYAN“

After FID is run, a GMF gets created for every event file on which FID is run. The GMF is present at the following path:

/WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/mf/geneva_admin/default/’current date’

2.Run RATE Process

Prerequisites for RATE process:

Go to the following path:

/WP01IRB1_irbapp/OPERATIONS/WEST_LOGS

RATE must always be run at this path only.

RATE can be run using single command, as follows :

nohupRATE -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/RMFP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" >file name.txt &

If more than one instance of RATE is to be run, set the thread count as shown below:

nohupRATE-c 1 -t 3 -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/RMFP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" >file name1.txt &

nohupRATE-c 2 -t 3 -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/RMFP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" >file name2.txt &

MONITORING RATING PROCESS

Even though rating process has been automated, it is necessary to monitor the process to ensure that it is running correctly and it does not abort or fail due to any reason.

Rating & FID Logs :The Rating and FID logs are present on billing server at the path: /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/LOGS/eventlog/[current date]

Open the log file using the command: cat log file name

Check the last line in the log file.

There could be three cases:

Process finishing with status 0

Means the process got completed without any error.

Process finishing with status 1

Process finishing with status 8

The process got completed but with some errors. In case of RATE, whenever a CDR is rejected log file will show this message.

Checking for duplicate events

The duplicate events are written to the IRB table – REJECTEVENT, under the column REJECT_CODE as RATE-19001.

Unloading the events

There are several situations in which it is necessary to undo the rating/loading

Note: The Event Unloader is an IRB system process that provides a mechanism for unloading events.The process is started from the command line as:

$> CEU arguments [arguments]

For example, CEU -a "-S -G -a <account_num>“

Rejected Event Maintenance

Note: Rejected Event Maintenance is the GUI from IRB to modify the events and resubmit them for rating. Rejected Event Input plug-in processes the events modified through Rejected Event Maintenance.

The command for this is:

nohup RATE -a "-plugInPath /WP01IRB1_irbapp/IRBWPROD/RB/lib/REIP.so -commitSize 2000 -bufferSize 2200" > test_4 &

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3.3 BILLING PROCESS

Billing process identifies the accounts that are due for billing, runs the billing engine, runs the Bill Data Writer to generate bill data Geneva Managed File(.gmf) extension.