Billing

The Billing process coordinates the activities that result in customers receiving their bills. This includes charge calculation, invoice creation and transmission, and updating account In the Cloud Monetisation Platform, a billing entity that can be used to manage payments on one or more subscriptions or payments for services. An account can hold details such as payments or invoices. balances and usage The consumption of services, for example a subscriber using call minutes. records. The Billing process is typically scheduled to run daily.

The process involves the following jobs:

• Invoice Production

  This job calculates charges and credits, and applies discounts for selected subscriptions and accounts.

  Subscriptions are selected for invoicing if they are either due to be billed or have requested an off-cycle bill. Subscriptions are ignored from invoicing if they are not connected, have had their final invoice produced or have been explicitly excluded, pending review, from invoicing.

  The following types of invoices are produced

  • FIRST: Produced shortly after subscription A billing entity that incurs a charge. Examples include a network attached device whose usage you want to measure and charge for, or a monthly software subscription connection and includes only non-usage advance charges.
  • NORMAL: The cyclical subscription invoice that contains both usage and non-usage charges.
  • FINAL: Produced when the subscription has terminated and may result in a credit back to the subscription when changes have been paid in advance.
• Rated Charges

  While CMP Converged Monetisation Platform. The MDS Global product that supports customer care and billing for digital service providers. calculates the price of the majority of non-usage items that appear in an invoice, it is possible to include non-usage items whose price has already been calculated by an external system. When CMP receives files containing rated charge records, these are automatically detected by a dedicated daemon A computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the control of an interactive user., which creates a rated charge batch in CMP for each file received. This job is responsible for performing the necessary updates in CMP to allow these charges to be available to the Billing process. This job is automatically triggered whenever a new rated charge batch has been created.

• Statement Production

  A statement in CMP is snapshot of the transactions ‐ invoices, adjustments and payments ‐ that have been posted to the sales ledger for a given account. A statement consists of an opening balance, closing balance, amount in query and transactions on an account at a point in time.

  When this job produces a statement, it calculates an opening balance, closing balance and a list of transactions.

• Bill Print

  Once invoice and statement details have been generated, they must be organised for printing by a third-party print bureau. The bureau will generate the bills according to the format and delivery preferences of individual subscriptions, for example email, print, or large font.

  The Bill Print job is responsible for organising the invoice and statement details into logical documents that correspond to the artefacts generated by the print bureau.

• Invoice Posting

  Once invoices have been generated, they must be posted to the sales (accounts receivable) ledger so that customer In the context of the Cloud Monetisation Platform, an individual or organisation who has signed an agreement to take goods and services from a service provider. A customer receives a bill associated with one or more subscriptions, and can be a single end user or a large company with many subscriptions assigned to one agreement. balances reflect the amounts due.

  This job is responsible for creating a Sales Ledger Batch, which contains a single record each for invoice with the invoice gross amount used to update the related account balance.

  Downstream daemons extract these batches, convert them to the required external system format and transmit them to the required destination.

• Usage Archiving

  Every time a subscription uses their handset A mobile phone to make a call, send a text or browse the web, the network In the context of CMP, the infrastructure on which usage of registered customers will be measured – this could be a mobile phone network, broadband network or other non-telecommunications network. records this activity and make the information available for collection, typically in batches. CMP receives many rated usage batches every day and over time the database will contain a large volume of usage records.

  To speed up access to unbilled usage during invoicing, billed and unbilled usage are separated by transferring usage details to the archive after they have been billed. This job creates a new rated usage archive and transfers newly invoiced usage into that archive.

• Receipt Print

  This job allows for an extract of prepaid bolt-ons to be produced for a print bureau. The bureau will then produce a receipt invoice that will allow the customer to claim back the tax paid. The job deals specifically with one-off bolt-ons that were purchased outside of CMP, i.e. those that do not appear on a post paid invoice.

• General Ledger

  A general ledger is a set of numbered accounts a business uses to keep track of its financial transactions and to prepare financial reports. Each account is a unique record summarizing each type of asset, liability, equity, revenue and expense. This job creates a batch detailing the daily breakdown of all payment, invoice, purchase and bond redemption information (along with an associated nominal code) for a particular calendar month. The job provides an additional breakdown for certain items e.g. recurring payments by payment type and invoices by tax rate. Downstream daemons extract these batches, convert them to the required external system format and transmit them to the required destination.

For more information on jobs, see the CMP 8.1 Batch Jobs and JSON JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a lightweight format for storing and transporting data, often used when data is sent from a server to a web page. Schemas Guide. Alternatively, in the Administration Console An operations web console that allows batch jobs to be scheduled, run manually and monitored. The console also provides for viewing and modification of business and user applicable system configuration., navigate to Daily Operations > Jobs. Click any job in the Jobs List for more details.

The following Billing jobs must be run in sequence:

1. Invoice Production job

2. Statement Production job

3. Bill Print job

4. Invoice Posting job

5. Usage Archiving

The jobs must run in this sequence because there are dependencies between the various jobs. For example, the Statement Production job relies on the invoices produced by Invoice Production job.

The following daemons are associated with the Billing process:

Type	Category	Activity	Details
Extract	Bill Print	To Generic Format	This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files that are available for conversion to third party format.
Transmission	Invoice Posting	To CMP Ledger	This daemon transfers files to third parties.
Extract	Invoice Posting	To Generic Format (G/L Invoice Posting)	This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files that are available for conversion to third party format.
Extract	Invoice Posting	To Generic Format (S/L Invoice Posting)	This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files that are available for conversion to third party format.
Extract	Receipt Print	To Generic Format	This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files, which are available for conversion to third party format.
Load	Rated Charges	From Generic Format	This daemon is responsible for the collection and decryption of generic CMP files and the creation of CMP batches which are available for processing into CMP by the appropriate batch job.
Extract	General Ledger	To Generic Format	This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files, which are available for conversion to third party format.

 

For more information on daemons, in the Administration Console, navigate to Daily Operations > Daemons. Click any daemon in the Daemons List for more details.

The following probes can be run against jobs and daemons in the Billing process:

Stage	Category	Name	Type	Description
Extract	Bill Print	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns number of files produced by Bill Print Extract Daemon today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates that no outbound files were produced and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for his probe.
Extract	Bill Print	Completed	SLA	SLA probe that returns number of files produced by Bill Print Extract Daemon today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates that no outbound files were produced and the SLA has been breached. Because this is an SLA probe, there is no email alert issued.
Batch	Bill Print	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns the number of times that Bill Print Job has run today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates the job has not run today and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for this probe.
Extract	General Ledger	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns number of files produced by the General Ledger Extract Daemon today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates that no outbound files were produced and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for his probe.
Extract	General Ledger	Completed	SLA	SLA probe that returns number of files produced by the General Ledger Extract Daemon today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates that no outbound files were produced and the SLA has been breached. Because this is an SLA probe, there is no email alert issued.
Batch	General Ledger	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns the number of times that the Bill Cycle Change job has run today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates the job has not run today and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for this probe.
Extract	Invoice Posting	Completed S/L	Alert	Alert probe that returns the number of files produced by the Invoice Posting Extract Daemon today for the Sales Ledger. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates that no outbound files were produced and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for this probe.
Extract	Invoice Posting	Completed S/L	SLA	SLA probe that returns number of files produced by the Invoice Posting Extract Daemon today for the Sales Ledger. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates that no outbound files were produced and the SLA has been breached. Since this is an SLA probe, there is no email alert issued.
Batch	Invoice Production	Completed	SLA	Alert probe that returns the number of times Invoice Production Job has run today. If this query returns a value of zero,this indicates the job has not run today and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for this probe.
Batch	Rated Charges	Completed	SAL	SLA probe that returns the number of CMP configuration errors detected by the Rated Charge Job today. The SLA is breached if the number of errors is above the defined threshold. These type of errors can be resolved by amending CMP configuration. Because this is an SLA probe, there is no email alert issued.
Batch	Rated Charges	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns the number of times the Rated Charge Job has run today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates the job has not run today and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for this probe.
Load	Rated Charges	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns the number of files received by the Rated Charge Load Daemon today. If this query returns a value of zero ,this indicates that no inbound files were received today and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured for this probe
Batch	Rated Charges	Completed	SLA	SLA probe that returns the number of CMP configuration errors detected by the Rated Charge Job today. The SLA is breached if the number of errors is above the defined threshold. This type of error can be resolved by amending CMP configuration. Because this is an SLA probe, there is no email alert issued.
Batch	Receipt Print	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns the number of times that Receipt Print Job has run today. If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates the job has not run today and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured on this probe.
Extract	Receipt Print	Completed	Alert	Alert probe that returns number of files produced by Receipt Print Extract Daemon today.If this query returns a value of zero, this indicates that no outbound files were produced and an alert will be sent to the recipients configured on this probe.

 

For more information on probes, in the Administration Console, navigate to Daily Operations > Probes. Click any probe In the Administration Console architecture, a mechanism which allows for the execution of predefined queries and for the comparison of the results of those queries against pre-configured targets. Probes can be reviewed and managed via the Admin Console. in the Probes List for more details.