Bill Print

Once invoice and statement details have been generated, they must be organised in a manner that is convenient for printing by a third party Of software; a reusable component developed to be either freely distributed or sold by an entity other than the original vendor of the development platform. print bureau. The Bill Print job produces an encrypted file that contains 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 invoice charges and statement information. The job organises the invoice and statement details into logical documents that correspond to the artefacts generated by the print bureau. The file is transmitted to an external print bureau by a separate Bill Print Transmission daemon A computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the control of an interactive user.. If the daemon cannot transmit the file to the external print bureau then the file is stored in an error directory for later reprocessing. If the file is transferred successfully then the file is persisted on file storage. The print bureau uses the file to generate actual invoices and statements according to subscribers' needs, for example large font or audio files.

Each encrypted file that Bill Print produces has a header section with global data and can include a series of containers known as envelopes. Each envelope represents:

• A distinct document address - for example delivery address or email address.
• Type - for example original or copy.
• Format - for example Braille or large font.

An envelope can contain any of the following sections:

• Statement

  A statement is optional for an 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.. If included, it shows an opening balance, closing balance and a breakdown of transactions (payments and adjustments) for the account at that point in time.

• Invoice

  An Invoice represents a subscriber The end user of a network.'s charges for the current billing period. The invoice is broken into two sections:

  • Account Charges - for example sales ledger adjustments and hardware orders.
  • Subscription Charges - for example monthly line rental and usage The consumption of services, for example a subscriber using call minutes..
• Detailed Bill

  A Detailed Bill shows a breakdown of a subscriber's usage in the current billing period and the baskets from which the usage was consumed. A basket can be:

  • money - for example £5.00
  • kilobytes - for example 1GB of data
  • minutes - 1000 texts

  The usage details can also include a discount value, which is the discount monetary amount applied to the usage.

CMP Converged Monetisation Platform. The MDS Global product that supports customer care and billing for digital service providers. allows the same subscriber to have multiple addresses – for example, the invoice could be sent to one address and the detailed bill to another. This is represented in the file as two distinct envelopes.

The job can also identify the parent subscription of an account (if one is configured) so that the print bureau can group In the Customer Manager Platform hierarchy, the highest level of the structure. The group level can be used to group corporates. Groups can hold financial information. all usage under that parent.

The job also handles Copy Requests, where a subscriber rings the Call Centre and requests a copy of a previously issued invoice, detailed bill or a statement. These also result in the creation of distinct envelopes.

On successful completion of the job, the encrypted 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. file is created in a secure location. An adapter is responsible for taking the file to the print bureau.

This job is part of the scheduled Billing process, which coordinates the activities of charge calculation, bill presentation and transmission. The Billing process is typically scheduled to run daily. The Bill Print job is one of a series of jobs that result in subscriptions receiving their invoice.

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 daemon(s) are associated with the Bill Print job:

Daemon			Details
Extract Bill Print To Generic Format			This daemon creates and encrypts generic CMP files that are available for conversion to third party format.

The following 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.(s) can be run against the Bill Print job:

Name			Type	Description
Bill Print Extract 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 this probe.
Bill Print Extract 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.
Bill Print Batch 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.

Relevant JSON schema A specification for JSON based format for defining the structure of JSON data.:

• bill-print.schema