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 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 print bureau collects the file and uses it 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

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 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 jobs in this sequence are:

1. Invoice Production job
2. Statement Production job
3. Bill Print job
4. Invoice Posting job

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.

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

• bill-print.schema