Billing Engine
Fundamentals of the Billing Engine:
An Overview:
A billing engine is a crucial core component of any billing software system intended to generate invoices automatically in the background. It takes different types of inputs, like customer data, subscription plans, payment details, etc., to calculate charges and generate the bills. It acts like the brain of the billing system and carries out very complex computations. It helps businesses in many ways, like automating manual tasks and processes and enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of the billing process.
EarnBill Billing Engine software elevates your billing experience in several critical areas, including automated invoices and payment reconciliation, while putting vital data at your fingertips. EarnBill’s sophisticated billing solution saves valuable time and avoids human intervention by automating the below processes, which also internally interact with other modules and components to facilitate subsequent procedures.
- Rating and Charging (+ usage-based).
- Invoice Generation (custom invoice design + automated currency conversion).
- Invoice Delivery (email with PDF attachment to customers).
- Payment Notification (custom email notification template)
- Payment Collection (multiple payment gateways of choice)
- Ageing and Dunning (for eligible customers).
- Revenue Realization (automated invoice payment reconciliation)
- Financial Reports.
Billing Engine Types:
The nature of every business is different, and use cases and their implementation also vary; therefore, EarnBill offers well-designed billing engine software in such a way that it serves every single need of industries. Below is a list of various types of billing engines, depending on industry and solution.
Recurring Billing Engine (Subscription-Based)
Usage-based Billing Engine (Mediation)
Real-time Billing Engine (OCS)
Enterprise Billing System (Telecom)
Prorated Billing
Flexible Billing
Complex Billing
IoT Billing
Customizable Billing
Core Functionalities:
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Product Catalog:
The product catalog is also vital since it feeds crucial input to the billing engine about pricing and rating information. It allows you to create and manage products, pricing models, subscription plans, discounts, etc. A product is the fundamental entity where rate and pricing strategies are defined, and the order is the one that holds customer-specific purchase details to be used for rating calculation by the billing engine. EarnBill’s Billing Engine offers an extensive product catalog module yet is flexible with all standard features, including plans and asset (tangible or intangible assets like any digital products) management capability.
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Customer and Orders:
Customers and their orders are the two most significant prerequisite features of the Billing Engine. They allow you to capture and manage customers and their order information, like contact details, billing preferences, payment details, order details (subscription plan, purchased one-time product), discounts, and other attributes. The billing engine uses this data as input for processing invoices. Further, EarnBill’s billing solution offers these two functionalities as comprehensive modules with various fine-grained features and controls, including personalized invoice templates for each customer.
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Data Input to the Billing Engine:
As depicted in the diagram, the billing engine requires some information as input to process and generate the bills. The input data includes customer data, product (subscription plan) purchase details, consumption data, etc. We get all this data from various sources, like one-time purchases, recurring services (subscription-based), usage-based business models, etc. Further, we might need to supply the customer’s pre-authorized payment details as input to the billing engine for collecting payments from customers automatically after bill generation.
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Rating Calculation:
The rating is about calculating charges based on various parameters like the pricing model, customer’s purchase quantity, subscription period, consumption, business rules, etc. Further, it also applies appropriate tiered pricing structures, discounts, taxes, late fees and penalties, and previous credits, if any. EarnBill’s Billing solution offers a list of built-in pricing strategies and rating configurations with the flexibility of customization based on your business requirements.
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Invoice Generation (Bill):
The subsequent job of Billing Engine after rating is to compose an invoice once rating calculations are complete. The engine compiles all the relevant information into an invoice format. The invoice engine typically includes customer information, service period, product, service charges, additional usage charges, the total amount, and any past dues. The EarnBill Billing Solution supports custom invoice templates with complex designs based on each client’s requirements in a configurable way. Post invoice generation, the Billing Engine sends invoice PDFs to customers over email.
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Payment Collection:
This step takes place after bills are sent to customers to collect payments automatically based on pre-authorized payment methods and the company’s rules. Sometimes, the billing engine software internally connects to the payment processing component for integration with gateways to facilitate secure online payments or schedule automatic debits. The payment process piece could be a separate independent component or integrated within the billing engine; this is more related to design and architecture.
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Ageing and Dunning:
It comes into play only when a customer does not pay the bill on or before the due date. It’s also called collections, which is the systematic process of communicating with customers to ensure the collection of accounts receivable (such as unpaid invoices). In other words, it refers to monitoring past-due receivables on customer accounts, which includes notifying customers as per aging rules, obtaining the money they owe, and taking necessary action on nonpayment cases. This process enhances revenue realization and improves customer happiness. Further, it also minimizes revenue leakage by automatically recovering failed payments using the EarnBill configurable retry mechanism.
BenefitsEarnBill Billing Engine
Scalability
The EarnBill billing platform is highly scalable and provides horizontal scalability as your business grows to accommodate an increasing subscriber base, which helps reduce costs over traditional on-premise software that requires maintenance and support for any additional features/functionalities as needed.
Integration
EarnBill provides a bunch of REST APIs for integration with any other system. With this, you can easily integrate with your internal or external systems like CRM, ERP, and payment gateways. Additionally, you get full support for the SOAP-based API suite. EarnBill allows custom API development at any implementation stage regarding data exchange with any other system to fulfill specific use cases.
Security and Compliance
The EarnBill platform adheres to industry standards for data security and privacy. It provides data encryption and compliance with payment card industry standards. The EarnBill platform meets most security compliance and regulatory requirements through ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, and PCI DSS. The regulatory requirements vary from country to country; however, meeting any specific certification standards develops a solid foundation and makes it easier for the platform to meet the country-specific regulatory requirements through customization.
Flexibility and Customization
The EarnBill Billing Engine Software provides extensive flexibility for handling diverse business use cases or situations. Additionally, it enables you to develop custom features according to your business needs and ideas with its framework and plugin-based architecture. The essential aspect of any software system is adaptability and the excellent ongoing customization that businesses need over time.
Support and Training
The final and most essential thing is customer service. As we know, excellent support always lays a strong foundation for growth. Therefore, EarnBill’s dedicated domain expertise team provides round-the-clock customer service and has experience in various successful implementations. The EarnBill team ensures a smooth launch by providing training and assistance to your staff as needed, monitoring your system, and ensuring your billing operations are uninterrupted.
Let’s think BIG for the future-proof Billing Engine:
The primary obstacle that most businesses today face is finding adaptable solutions for aligning billing needs with their business strategy, like how quickly a new feature can be available to the market for customer use. Sometimes, reputed providers can take longer to release new features. As a result, it takes longer for business ideas to be commercialized; thus, they could not materialize as quickly as they would have.
The EarnBill team uses an agile working methodology with their billing domain expertise and problem-solving abilities to find the best solutions that can save you a substantial amount of money and provide you access to a roadmap of your company’s preferences.