Telecom Billing Solutions Best Practices in 2025

Telecom Billing Solutions Best Practices are an amalgamation of patterns, rules and guidelines related to the telecom billing system implementation, including the business side, the technology, the deployment options, the security aspects and the regulatory compliance. It also covers best practices for the go-live (or the launch), achieving efficient billing operations and support, launching new features through system design and development, system integrations and more.

This blog focuses on understanding all the ‘spokes in the wheel’ that make for a successful telecom billing system implementation. It delves into details of each of the above mentioned aspects and how they go a long way to not only succeed in the system implementation, but to achieve the organisational goal of using the system for efficient business growth.

A Billing and Revenue Management System (a.k.a. the BRM System) is like the heart of a Telecom business ecosystem. It is the system that pumps all the data, namely the pricing, rating and billing information into various systems such as the CRM system, the customer self service portal, the end-customer mobile app and the accounting or the financial reporting systems. A Telecom business ecosystem consists of various systems connected together. Each of the sub systems is used in different areas of the business to perform a set of functional tasks. A telecom business’ system landscape is explained in our page on the Telecom Billing Ecosystem here.

A Telecom Billing and Revenue Management system tracks the revenue through the end-to-end management of the business use cases and workflows, from inception of the business through a new customer account, tracking accumulation of charges for using various services, charging subscriptions and consumption, posting invoices and realisation of the revenue through the payment collection.

A telecom BRM system contains all the rating, charging and revenue information which is required by the accounting and finance team in an organisation. The BRM system also provides accounting and financial reports which are crucial for an organisation’s tracking of the sales made, the revenue posted, the revenue realised, the service credits provided, the taxes that need to be paid to the government and more. For organisations that have public or private investments, this is all the more important. The quarterly reporting needs to be accurate and should stand the scrutiny of the auditors for statutory compliance.

A BRM system implementation involves various aspects that need to be part of the detailed project plan. The business team needs to work closely with the software implementation team to make the most of the expertise available on both sides, and to achieve complete project success. Let us go through these best practices for a successful telecom billing implementation. In other words, let us look at how to implement a telecom billing system efficiently.

The above diagram shows the various aspects of a Telecom Billing Implementation that need to work in tandem for a successful launch and running a stable system. Such a system implementation needs coordination of various teams, departments and experts working together for a common goal. Let us first look into the team that is required for a successful launch and maintaining and enhancing the system thereafter to meet the business goals.

For a mid to large size telecom billing implementation, you would need various different teams and individuals with expertise in varied areas of the system. Here is a take down on the expertise you need with their targeted areas or functions:

• • Business Analysts – A telco business would need one or more business analysts depending on the size of the company and the number of initiatives it is driving. The business analysts help drive the strategic initiatives of the organisation by deep diving into business use cases and functionality and identifying clearly areas that can help with increasing the revenue, reducing the cost and improving efficiencies.

• • Telecom Architect – A Telco Architect is a Systems Architect who has worked in telecom system implementations as a developer and as an architect. He or she should have a good understanding of the telecom domain, the network provisioning aspects, the CDR processing and the OCS system implementation etc. This person should be a techno-functional expert who can act as a bridge between the business and the development teams.

• • Technical Architect – A technical architect is a person who is a specialist in the technology, products and tools used for the implementation. The technical architect would work more closely with the development team to provide the design, solution and implementation, versus the Telco Architect carries out more the functional architecture of the system, takes decisions such as which system does what and makes decisions on the integration aspects.

• • Development Team – The software development team would carry out the development and implementation work and ensure that the BRM software is running efficiently with all its features. The development team ensures that the software issues are resolved in time and new features are developed and rolled out quickly to tap into the new business opportunities.

• • Testing Team – You need a QA (Quality Assurance) or testing team to ensure that the changes to the software are tested well and rolled out as part of the maintenance releases or the new features releases in a controlled manner. The testing team is essential to ensure the releases are certified for the production use.

• • Infosec team – The Information Security forms a very critical component of the telecom billing system implementation. They ensure security in all system components, carry out security scans, find out vulnerabilities and resolve them proactively.

• • DevOps team – The DevOps team is very crucial for a successful telecom billing software deployment. They have the knowledge and expertise to ensure the end-to-end automation in deployments, ensure high availability and DR (Disaster Recovery) environments for the system.

• • Billing Ops team – The day to day billing operations are carried out by the billing ops. They run the various jobs in the system or track and monitor them on a daily basis to ensure smooth functioning of the system.

• • Support Specialists for the billing department – There are at least 3 different components or sub teams required for an efficient billing support:

• • • • One, you need an on-call support team that can take customer complaints and give assurance, commitments and timelines to the users for resolving their complaints. Such an on-call support team would raise tickets through a support portal for the billing admin to review.
      • Second, the billing admin should be a senior professional with some assistance to review the billing issues and categorise them as system bugs, configuration issues, data entry errors, or simply working as designed.
      • Lastly, the third aspect is the support specialists from the BRM system who are techno functional experts who can resolve the system bugs, help correct the data configurations and provide resolutions to the customer complaints.

• • Finance Team – A finance team would look after accounting and financial reports generated from the billing system. They would monitor the day to day revenue, costs, service level credits, account credits, payments and also put together the quarterly reports to be shared with the management and the financial auditors.

• • Collection team – The collection team is in charge of the payment collection process. They own the relationship with the payment gateways, the banks and drive the collection rules through the BRM system. They are the ones who will take care of manual collections and write-off decisions in cases of bad debts.

Various Functions in a Telecom Billing System Implementation

This section of the blog dives into the various functions that are involved for a successful telecom billing system implementation. A successful telecom billing system implementation is not only the one where the launch and go-live is successful, but it is one in which there are on-going enhancements and improvements taking place in the system.

The software systems can be considered like a real life human team working in close coordination with each other to achieve results. As a human team would require training, guidance and cost to function efficiently, the software systems too need investments of time and money from the organisation in order to keep making the enhancements and the improvements to propel the business growth and resolving the software issues in a timely manner to avoid any erroneous billing.

In line with such a planning, the following functions need to be reviewed by the telcos for a successful BRM system implementation:

This is a major function of the business team. This is driven by the top management with the help from business analysts and a telecom architect. The company decides on the business priorities, which are the initiatives that need to be executed first and which ones later. The business team is in close touch with the market to know its pulse and decides on the initiatives and the changes that need to be made in the organisation and in the BRM system. Typically, an annual roadmap is chalked out and provided to the business managers to execute in various departments.

Based on the roadmap that is chalked out by the business team, the telecom architect in close coordination with senior technical architects or designers finalises a list of key areas and features to work on. The scalability requirements are finalised and targets identified for the next 1 to 2 years. For example, if the business expects ‘2X’ growth in business in the next 1 year, then there needs to be benchmarking (testing) done for transactions, jobs and areas of the system that may be impacted by increasing volumes.

It may not be possible to design/develop all the systems in-house. It is important to identify a BRM system partner who can work closely with your various teams and help in achieving the business goals.

Information security is a very important aspect of a successful implementation and deployment. The Infosec team takes care of the system, data and network security to ensure various compliance such as the ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS and GDPR compliance.

These compliance standards ensure safety and protection of the PII data (Personally Identifiable Information) for the end-customers and also ensure that there is no SAD (Sensitive Authentication Data like credit card information) getting logged and stored anywhere in the system. The security compliance strengthens the organisation’s ISMS processes and secures the system perimeter that holds the business data.

This is a DevOps function and dedicated expertise does a lot of good to this function. The BRM software is a mission critical system. It needs the high availability and the DR set up. Whether you are on premise or on cloud, the DevOps team can ensure you tick all boxes of a robust software system deployment.

The DevOps team does several functions, out of which the most key ones include automating the deployment, implementing IaaC (Infrastructure As A Code) to spin up the complex multi-node deployments with Terraform and Ansible scripts, schedule regular system and software updates, carry out software upgrades in a planned manner and propose more modern infrastructure services in the deployment.

One of the most important aspects of a successful implementation is going live in a timely fashion and ensuring accuracy with billing. For this, you need an effective billing department, the one that can efficiently test the various rating and charging scenarios in a UAT and give the green light to go live. An effective billing ops team ensures that the daily job SLAs are met and the system is processing all the desired transactions, the CDRs in a timely manner and completing the jobs such as the bill run and collection runs well on time.

The “go-to-market” strategy is one of the crucial aspects in telecom billing system implementation, especially in the context of rolling out new functionality / enhancement / improvement changes. Further, in the competitive world, the faster we deliver to the customers, the quicker we can get feedback, make improvements, and stay ahead of competitors – as a result, the strategy helps drive customer satisfaction and business growth.

In fact, the billing solution should enable telecom businesses to convert their new business ideas into reality by making them available for the end customers within the stipulated time. Sometimes it’s seen that even a small feature takes a long time to deliver to the customers, which indirectly costs more in the long run. Therefore, engage with a team that helps you to overcome these challenges and make your ideas realise faster.

This is a very essential function in the landscape of telecom billing solutions to ensure the accuracy and reliability of everything that is going live. By automating functional use cases and processes in greater detail, businesses can save a lot of manual effort that goes with every release, no matter how big the change is.

Most of the billing solutions provide automation for the system’s core functionalities, such as invoice generation, payment processing, and tax calculations, but they lack coverage for custom workflows, specific use cases, and features (custom functionality) built over time. Further, automation reduces the risk of human error while speeding up QA regression testing cycles. So, having automation of functional tests saves costs and builds confidence in rolling out new features, updates and new business ideas as and when needed without worrying about quality.

After going live, effective support ensures that the system is monitored on an ongoing basis to find out any issues proactively and resolve them in a timely manner. The problems reported by end users need to be quickly addressed to maintain their confidence and boost their brand loyalty. This customer retention and loyalty due to effective support goes a long way in picking up on reference business and mouth publicity. The support team should be a combination of techno-functional expertise.

The BRM system design and its monitoring should ensure that the data accuracy and integrity are maintained. There needs to be good audit logging capabilities in the system to trace down changes to the data. The data needs to be periodically backed up and maintained in secured storage space. The data at rest as well as the data in transition should always be encrypted. Data encryption goes a long way in ensuring data security.

Telcos need to ensure that there is at least one test environment which has all the integrated software systems deployed for system testing purposes where the integration points are tested. All the software systems involved need to have the data in sync at all times. There needs to be monitoring across systems to ensure right mapping across the systems with ids and accounts etc.

EarnBill does functional monitoring of the rating and charging and finds out any discrepancies that may lead to revenue leakage. With EarnBill, it is easy to design and develop fraud detection plugins that can be used as filters to detect fraudulent activities while carrying out payments from various channels. Find out more about EarnBill’s Revenue Detection mechanism here.

Telecom billing solutions best practices consist of identifying the functions that are crucial for your telecom business and identifying the right teams, the right roles and the individuals with right expertise for those roles. It requires that the various departments of the organisation are working in a highly coordinated and synchronised manner with ‘all of the company’ approach towards the same business goal, with the BRM system as a key system in achieving that goal.

This blog covers in detail the aspects of a successful telecom billing system implementation. EarnBill is a flexible BRM system with an experienced team to fulfil the above mentioned system implementation functions. They are a trusted telecom billing implementation partner. You can reach them here.