Telecommunications billing

Telecommunications billing is the group of processes of communications service providers that are responsible to collect consumption data, calculate charging and billing information, produce bills to customers, process their payments and manage debt collection.

Telecommunications billing system is an enterprise application software designed to support the telecommunications billing processes.

Telecommunications billing is a significant component of any commercial communications service provider regardless specialization: telephone, mobile wireless communication, VoIP companies, mobile virtual network operators, internet service providers, transit traffic companies, cable and satellite TV companies could not operate without billing, because it creates an economic value of their business.

Billing functions can be grouped to three areas: operations, information management, financial management. In the broad sense, when billing and revenue management (BRM) is considered as a single process bundle, as special functional areas could be picked out revenue assurance, profitability management, fraud management.

Operations area includes functions of capturing usage records (depending on the industry it can be call detail records, charging data records, network traffic measurement data, in some cases usage data could be prepared by telecommunications mediation system), rating consumption (determining factors, significant for further calculation, for example, calculating total time of calls for each tariff zones, count of short messages, traffic summary in gigabytes), applying prices, tariffs, discounts, taxes and compiling charges for each customer account, rendering bills, managing bill delivery, applying adjustments, maintaining of customer account.

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