Enterprise Billing Software

The telecom companies have the complex use cases as well as the high load requirements to service their customers well and then bill them accurately. They depend very heavily on the enterprise-grade software systems. More about how telecom companies manage their software ecosystem is explained here in the Telecom Billing Ecosystem page.

The Telecom Companies can be categorised as:

The Internet Service Providers (or ISPs) have the need for the enterprise-grade billing systems due to high scale, recurring billing use cases with monthly or quarterly anniversary billing and tracking of billing for assets such as routers and other such equipment. They also need to automatically activate or deactivate services based on payments or non payments. This ISP Billing blog provides more insights.

There is a whole new auxiliary services industry which depends on underlying telecom services such as calling, internet data or messaging. For example, there are toll free number providers, virtual number providers, e-sim providers, prepaid travel card providers and more. All these are value added services to the underlying telecom services.

There are many companies that provide services for helping the business communications like the answering services or live reception (which are essentially call centres with specific purposes), internet based tools or software that allow easier communication while working from home like chat rooms, calling tools etc. These companies offer plans that are based on a subscription fee and cover a certain consumption of the service under this fee. Any additional usage is termed as overage, is measured and charged separately. This is an interesting case study of a business communications service provider in the US.

The IoT based service providers need complex inventory management (or asset management) that can track statuses of their devices, activate or deactivate the devices based on whether the invoices are paid or not, and integrate with telecom service providers to ensure smooth functioning of the devices. This is in addition to the subscription billing and the consumption billing use cases.

The Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) or Cloud Infrastructure providers follow the PAYG (or Pay As You Go) charging system. This system entails that the customers pay for the time they use the infrastructure resources such as the VMs, VPCs, storage devices and so on. A Cloud Billing system tracks all the resources used by a customer account and the time they are in use so that the customers can be charged accurately.

The power companies charge their consumers with rental amounts as well as consumption charges by tracking the meter readings for the power consumption. The system nowadays also has prepaid options so that customers can recharge their accounts and only when they have balance can they use the electricity.

The other household utilities such as water and cooking gas are also billed in similar way as the electricity. The metered reads provide the consumption of the specific utility and this consumption can be charged in postpaid manner or based on prepaid account balance.