Cadebill » Products » Billing

Billing

Billing forms the core module of the Cadebill solutions suite. As the central point of control, billing manages the core business information such as product catalog management, customer management, rate management, CDR processing, customer taxation and customer financial accounting. Cadebill core billing engine provides unparalleled flexibility to setup any kind of product, product packages, any kind of CDR from any source, user defined rating structures, tax rules, user defined contract templates that can manage any business operations involving metered charges, recurring charges, event based charges and ad-hoc charges.

Catalog Management

Catalog management forms the basis of the entire operation. All products, services and packages of the entire business operation are controlled with the help of Catalog management that models the business operation. Every product, service, and product package that is offered to your customers or offered by your vendors is defined and maintained here. The powerful modeling tool allows your business to quickly create or modify your product offerings from time to time. Some of the key information in catalog management includes:

Products and their hierarchies.
Product tax codes
Product provisioning data
Product business segment such as VoIP, Internet, Cable, Home Security
Product packages - the ability to group different products and offer as various packages

Customer Management

Customer Management manages the core information needed for billing the customer accurately, including customer locations, products and services offered, rates, discounts, contracts, taxes and billing cycles. Some of the key information stored and maintained includes:

Basic Customer information such as customer locations and sub accounts. Cadebill's powerful sub account hierarchy enables customer accounts be categorized or divided into multiple sub accounts - each sub account can represent a site, department or any category that determines the hierarchy of large corporate accounts or enterprises. With the help of hierarchical sub accounts, each parent sub account can be billed for all sub accounts down the hierarchy.
User defined billing cycles that allow multiple billing cycle templates such as monthly, weekly, bi-monthly, quarterly and yearly with flexible override option.
Products offered to the customers at each sub account, circuit and account levels along with rate information, discount information, contract information.
Circuit information, phone numbers, I.P addresses, email addresses or any other customer specific information that uniquely identifies the resources through which the products and services are offered.
Customer locations where the products are offered to accurately apply the taxes that are applicable based on the local laws of the geographical location.
Ability to assign multiple invoice formats for customers with the option to export to PDF, Word and other formats that can be used for integrating with third party print and mail service providers.

Rate Management and Rating Engine

Cadebill offers a flexible, robust billing engine that can cater to any kind of rating requirements. The built-in rating engine offers flat rating, key based rating, dial code based rating, calendar based rating for recurring charges such as monthly, weekly, bi-monthly, quarterly and yearly. The built-in rating engine combines user defined rating mechanisms that provide no limits to the type of rating that can be setup in the system. Some of the key features include:

Powerful built-in rating engine.
Flexible rule driven templates to work with any switch or source.
User defined algorithms to extend or cater for specific business requirements.
Custom error handling procedures.
User defined templates for contract enforcement.
User defined templates for promotions and discounts.

CDR Rating

The CDR rating is driven by user defined templates that controls how the CDRs are rated. Some of the key features include:

Ability to rate any CDR from any switch or data source with the help of user defined rules.
Ability to split a single CDR to multiple CDRs in situations where a single CDR may not be enough to accurately bill all the products contained in the CDR.
Ability to identify the products defined in the product catalog with the help of user defined rules.
Ability to manipulate the CDRs as needed in situations where the raw CDR from the source does not contain enough information to accurately bill the products contained in the CDR.
Ability to identify the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as ASR, ABR, PGAD, ALOC or any other quality parameter to determine the service quality levels.
Ability to bill each service provider along the hierarchy for a service provided to an end customer, when the end customer is served through multiple providers.

Customer Taxation

The core billing module comes with two powerful tax engines. The native tax engine allows the business user to define the specific taxes that are applicable to the products across different tax authorities. The other tax engine is integrated with www.salestax.com (CCH) data. Business users will subscribe for the data feed from CCH which Cadebill will use to calculate the taxes based on the customer location. The native tax engine and the integrated CCH tax engine can work together in situations where the power of both engines are required to calculate the taxes. Integration with other tax data service providers is also possible. Some of the key features include:

Accurate taxes with detailed tax summary reports that can be readily used for tax compliance.
Ability to exempt customers who are exempt from taxes of certain or all tax authorities.
Internal (native) tax engine that lets the user input the tax data without the need for external data subscription. This is useful in locations where the taxes are simple, straightforward and easily manageable.
Integration with external tax engine that lets the user choose their tax data service provider such as CCH (www.salestax.com). This is useful in locations where the taxes are more complex in nature such as telecom taxes in the USA.
Ability to use native tax engine and external tax engine at the same time.
Ability to apportion taxes across multiple tax authorities when products need to be taxed across tax jurisdictions.
Ability to tax customers spread across multiple geographical locations based on their actual service location.

Customer Financial Accounting

The billing module offers a complete suite of financial accounting tools such as:

Detailed Account ledger that lists all historical transactions for each circuit, sub account, product including credits, debits, adjustments and dispute amounts.
Customer balance summary reports with aging reports such as 30 days aging, 60 days aging, 90 days aging and 120 days aging.
Ability to apply payments and adjustments at each line item of customer invoice.