Postpaid Billing Revenue Assurance

Billing Systems

Billing systems are the central hub of a Telcos revenue generation activity. It connects all the services provided by the Telco, with the customer usage of those services. Telco billing systems have typically lagged behind service innovation, resulting in either no billing or poorly constructed billing frameworks. This makes the billing system a central candidate for revenue leakage.

Postpaid Assurance

Revenue assurance of post paid billing systems can be split into three areas:

1. CDR Pre-cycle Processing
2. Cycle Processing
3. Post Cycle

CDR Pre-Cycle Processing

Pre-cycle includes CDR generation, collection, mediation and routing to the billing system. CDRs received by the billing system, are in a pre-processed format.

CDR Preprocessing includes:

• Identification and formatting of the CDRs - includes pre-rating [assigning an estimated value onto each call in order to track the amount owed by the customer at any time]
• Depositing the CDRs into the appropriate cycle file - holds all CDRs for customers sharing a billing cycle, until the end of the cycle when their bills are generated.
• Suspension and Error processing – for CDRs not ready to be placed into cycle files.

Pre-Cycle Assurance

Pre-Cycle Assurance duplicates assurance on the mediation system:
Validating the integrity of CDRs accepted
Validating the integrity of the batches of CDRs sent from mediation or other sources
Checking that the formatting, suspension and error-ing of records is being done correctly

Methods used include:

1. Sample audits of specific CDRs associated with different customers, events or conditions
2. Comprehensive balance audits of complete "batches" of CDRs
3. Comprehensive cycle audits of all of the CDRs for a particular bill cycle

These audits require the analyst to gain access to stores of CDRs at multiple points along the pre-cycle trail, and reconciling CDR integrity and type counts.

Cycle Processing [Bill Generation]

At the end of a pre-scheduled cycle, the billing system accepts and sorts all CDRs held in a cycle, and processes them through formal rating and billing processes. This includes:

1. Rating of CDRs x Customer
2. Application of monthly fees to each bill
3. Application of unpaid balances and adjustments from earlier cycles
   

Billing Cycle Integrity Assurance

The integrity of the billing cycle run typically involves the tracing CDRs through the entire cycle process. This requires the analyst to fully understand the billing system operations, so that audits of all the different tables in different parts of the cycle can be performed.

Post Cycle Revenue Assurance

Post Cycle Revenue Assurance is a series of checks and audits run against the results of the billing cycle run. This ensures that the billing cycle ran processed data correctly before the bills were published.

This may also include "spot audits" of individual customer bills, and "batch audits" of the totals generated by the cycle.

The steps in post-cycle assurance include:

1. Extraction of a sampling of customer invoices and the manual validation of their integrity
2. Comprehensive "batch total" runs and comparisons against historical results and against forecast
3. Comprehensive audits of revenue totals against network activity to assure that the appropriate revenue realization levels are being met

Post Paid Revenue Assurance Project

This includes:

1. High Level Cycle Integrity Check – review of full cycle summary reports that summarize the total revenues generated by the cycle and comparing totals against forecast totals.
2. Category Checks – review reports by category as subsets of the billing cycle info, based upon different criteria [customer type, service type, geography etc.]
3. Individual Customer Sampling Validation - random sample of individual customer records manually validated against the detailed CDRs across the CDR processing stream.

Each of these checks seeks to ensure that the values generated by the run itself, and the billing of individual customers is accurate.

NEXT: Prepaid Billing Revenue Assurance

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Revenue Assurance | Telco Model | Telco Operations | Billing | Leakage | Types of RA | RA Capability | RA Operations | Network | Mediation | Postpaid Billing | Prepaid Billing | Collections & Debt Recovery | Interconnect