Revision as of 09:59, 20 February 2017

Overview

Invoicing is at the very heart of the Emersion billing system. All core features and functions are designed around the purpose of invoice creation and distribution. Without invoicing, there is no billing.

This area is designed as a landing page for all invoicing related topics, including:

Customising your invoice templates Global and customer-level settings Activities that happen when the billing period closes. Options for mid-cycle invoice generation. Options for managing invoices. Approving invoices and getting them out to your customers. and more.....

While Emersison's system is designed to automate as many billing and invoicing functions with the objective of freeing up your staff to perform more important activities, the billing of customers isn't 100% hands-off. There are activities and tasks your company needs to do in each bill cycle to ensure accurate and efficient billing. Emersion give you the tools to perform all these important activities but the system cannot perform them for you. All the articles and help in this section aims to provide you with generic advice and help on how you can achieve smooth and efficient bill runs that help secure your revenue and support you in your goals of expansion and growth.

While invoices are the primary output of Emersion's billing system, there are several important inputs that users need to be familiar with. We refer to these in articles pertaining to invoicing and billing.

Account Invoice Period

All accounts are set up with an Account Invoice Period. This is a frequency-based period of time that determines the overall billing cycle for the account. Invoices are generated after the current account invoice period is closed. Read more about the Account Invoice Period.

Billing Objects

If invoices are the output, the inputs are the billing objects. These are the objects where your pricing and billing business rules are contained. If billing objects are incorrectly configured, incorrect charges on invoices will be the result. Learn more about the billing objects in Emersion.

Subscription Periods

Like the account invoice period, periods are also created by the system for billing objects. While it is common to align a package subscription or service subsctipion period to the account invoice period, there are plenty of cases where they should not be aligned. Subscription periods are created for Packages, services, service features, bolt-ons and bolt-on add-ons.

Service Types

An object represents a single type of service that can be sold to an customer. Or in other words, it is something that a customer can subscribe to. Read more about Service Types here.

Batch Mediation System (BMS)

The BMS is a special sub-system in the Emersion ecosystem. It's purpose is to receive usage files from external parties, and to generate usage files. It is the entry point of the Emersion system for all manner of usage that is provided in regular 'batch' files. It does not process usage in 'real-time'. Usage files are unpacked by BMS and the contents are translated before it is sent to the Emersion rating engine.

Rating

The Rating engine takes usage that has been prepared by BMS and determines what the charge should be. This is calculated using the rates and profiles defined in your rate cards and product rate cards.

Accounts have services, such as mobile or landline phones, or ADSL data access. The services are linked to packages, plans and rate cards that are used to determine the charges to invoice the accounts when the system processes usage data provided by upstream suppliers. The Emersion Billing and Rating Engine takes into account the tariff as supplied from the supplier, the rate card attached to the plan, plus any rate overrides that may be currently active for the relevant account, such as bolt ons, bolt-on add-ons and included value, as well as package level discounts and fees.

On the billing day (as defined by the accounts’ settings), the Billing System automatically creates invoices in Adobe® Acrobat® PDF format. The PDF invoices can then be downloaded, emailed, printed, saved and viewed. If your supplier uses the Emersion Billing Platform, you may also be able view invoices received from them.

Invoice .PDFs files are created based on the invoice templates set up. The .PDF templates contain the design of the invoice, including the header page, payment options, account summary, and service details, along with the company logos and other specific branding. Details are inserted into each account’s invoice, including the account’s name and address, invoice number, account number, invoice date, with all current items and charges, as well as the invoice due date. These variables are placed in pre-defined areas of the invoice.

All invoices created for all accounts in the system are listed in the Finance > Accounts Receivable > Invoice List page. You can also view invoices created for a specific account in the Invoices tab of the Customers > Customer List > view Account page. Invoices should be audited to check for any errors or missing charges. Once any adjustments have been made, the invoices should be approved. Once the invoices are approved, the system sends the invoices to customers via the default invoice delivery methods set up in each customer account’s record.

Please note the processing time for the Invoice and Billing processes see Account Invoice Period

Note: The system does not send invoices to an account until the invoice has been successfully Approved. Rejected invoices are not sent.

Immediate Invoices

In addition to the invoices automatically created by the Billing and Rating engine, the system allows you to create ad-hoc or immediate invoices. Immediate invoices can contain any pending cardlines held against the account, which may include cardlines created by the Billing and Rating engine for charges associated with services, product purchases, and ad hoc charges created manually.

Batch Mediation System (BMS)

The Batch Mediation System (BMS) obtains batched (i.e. non real-time) Service Information Records (SIRs) from supplier(s). The SIRs (e.g. usage data such as Call Detail Records or RADIUS accounting records) are generally retrieved from an FTP location. Verification is performed on the usage information retrieved to ensure the information is complete and corruption free. Sequence checking is performed to detect any missing files or sequence errors. Inbound mediation is then performed, which translations the data into Emersion standardised formats for use within the system for rating and invoicing.

BMS assigns a tariff to the SIR record. BMS locates the service within the system based on the service identifier, which may be the calling party, or charged number identifier within the SIR record. Using this information, all accounts that are to be invoiced for the record are located. As the system supports a multi-tiered account hierarchy, the end customer, the service provider, and the wholesaler may all be invoiced from the single usage record, per the service package, plan and rate information set up at each level.

Quarantine

During the rating, billing and invoicing process, issues may arise for many reasons, such as missing service information, incorrect rating data, or issues with the service usage file received from your upstream service provider. The Billing and Rating engine places these records into Quarantine for manual investigation. Once the issue is resolved, the records can be re-processed through the billing and rating engine to place the associated charges on to the required account’s invoice. You should regularly review Quarantine to resolve billing issues to ensure your account’s invoices are generated correctly.

See

• Rating, Billing and Invoice Process
• Invoice Auditing
• Invoice Management
• Quarantine