Explore how realtime billing engines process usage events instantly to calculate charges, enabling prepaid services and one-time purchases across telecom and e-commerce industries.
A system that captures usage events and processes them to calculate charges instantly is known as machine billing. As designed, it also controls payment from customers in advance for prepaid mobile services before calculating charges for actual usage. The telecom sector uses a real-time billing system when customers can pay the amount before accessing services. The customers can renew their account balances and reuse it via the online portal. Further, it is not limited to only telecom use cases that require on-the-spot billing engine.
The EarnBill realtime billing system employs an OCS (online charging system) and a core billing Engine to determine the charges of every transaction. Further, it keeps evaluating the prepaid balance if the customer acquires/or fails support to the customer has a balance available. Anyhow, it happens in real-time - the moment a customer uses the balance, the service deducts immediately and shows when the balance turns zero. In the case of prepaid mobile service, Long story short, real-time billing is memorized with a prepaid approach to which consumers pay this service charges in advance. However, in the postpaid model, you use the amount after utilizing the services.
Its primary use is in real-time billing telecom mobile prepaid services, but currently being used in various other sectors. Let us dive deep into two business use cases below:
The realtime billing engine runs behind any e-commerce application (unlike one-time transactions) in any other business sector where you pay to buy something and receive a paid invoice, in this model, sometimes a customer may still be intrigued in getting the invoice, but companies do it for financial accumulation and asset purposes.
This instance is that our daily online shopping services can carry out real-time charging and invoicing, IVR, it happens instantly before the action. Followed by sending invoices emails to the customer via email or written in the call, IVR. The EarnBill real-time billing system integrates with the customer via order confirmation.
As shown in the diagram, once a customer finalizes the product to buy, the mobile apps (before proceeding to the payment) talks to the backend system for real-time rating and real-time charging with all applicable discounts and taxes to show it to the customer for confirmation. After confirmation, the customer proceeds with the payment, which interacts with the backend system to convert (in-to the payment gateway. Once payment is successful, the system puts into the order confirmation at an instant (with payment, billing, and invoice details) for the customer.
The EarnBill real-time billing system helps any sort of business to set up and streamline your rating, charging, and billing workflows, integrate with the payment gateway, and manage diverse transactions on your requirements.
The telecom business requires real-time billing for rating and charging prepaid mobile usage immediately. Therefore, the prepaid mobile service depends on an online charging system to keep track of usage and charge it (which cannot wait for voice calls or data usage), and accordingly, update the billing account with information.
EarnBill real-time billing offers the following complex features:
The crucial thing is that all the above functions happen within a fraction of a second - real-time capabilities. Let's understand it further with an example and diagram.
Suppose a company offers a prepaid mobile monthly plan at $20 that gives 500 minutes of domestic voice calls and 1 GB of internet data. However, talk to you unique numbers (as toll free or call center numbers) are chargeable and will be deducted from your balance, which means you only have the space (500 minutes). The difference and discounts may vary depending on the country and company.
Consider a scenario where a customer makes a call to someone. The real-time billing system receives a CDR (call data record) event from the telecom network system and terminal nodes to perform authentication and authorization. After that, the network system communicates with network systems to terminate the call if to the customer has a balance available.
Another scenario is when a customer calls with a specific number, the real-time billing charges usage (call duration), deducts the amount directly from the prepaid account balance and continues the service if the customer has a balance available.
In any of the above scenarios, the real-time billing engine keeps track of usages (becoming or ongoing calls, data, other) then charges usage instantly, followed by deactivating the service from the prepaid account balance. Let's understand a further example and diagram.
The EarnBill system is flexible enough to accommodate your business requirements for charging usage / transaction data using various customizable pricing strategies to determine how much a customer owes. This EarnBill real-time billing is not just an online charging system but a complete billing & revenue management that serves the comprehensive purpose of a complex billing proposal + accounts solution with revenue projection through it, additionally includes such capability of running batches over items.
Discover how EarnBill's realtime billing engine can process instant charges with customizable pricing strategies
