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The competitive business environment is demanding an extremely fast pace of innovation. In order to realize the full revenue potential from such innovations, a flexible and powerful Billing infrastructure is a must.

• Today’s dynamic business landscape often involves innovations in Product or Pricing strategies. When an enterprise innovates in these areas, its Billing systems almost invariably have to shadow the change so as to support the requisite billing impacts of the innovation.



• Customer centric billing including cross Product-Line Bundles & Packages are un-supportable by most legacy Billing systems (both in-house and vendor provided) that have evolved around Billing needs of a specific line of business.



• Inability to efficiently support Revenue & Royalty Share Settlements for Partner products & services ordered. To attract and retain the best Partners, they need to execute sophisticated Revenue Share & Royalty agreements and enforce these accurately and consistently at the time of settlement.



• Spreadsheets based billing infrastructure is not a real option. This approach (a) cannot scale with business growth; (b) is a source of billing errors, delayed & missed billing opportunities; (c) takes up significant manual effort to monitor the billing process thereby adding to costs.
  
  
  To deliver a solution to the above problems, a flexible and powerful Billing infrastructure is needed. This infrastructure has to be able to support multiple operational challenges encountered by enterprises...
  
  
  
           leverage an efficient Transactional Engine to rate & price different kinds of transactional line items like products & options, packages & bundles, metered resource usage, fees, surcharges & taxes; based on pre-defined pricing plans (and agreements). This engine should be able to calculate prices based on unit, flat and percentage based rates; with support for multiple units of measure; and support various kinds of pricing methods like single & double quantity breaks, step functions, user-defined, etc. Also support multi dimensional rating & pricing based on any number of criteria like Location, State, Partner, Group Client, Agreement, etc.

  
  

• Seamlessly access information about Products, Market aligned Bundles & Packages; for purposes of billing. This information should be rapidly synchronized from Product Master Tables; or rapidly defined and maintained from an easy-to-use GUI environment if such Master Tables are unavailable.



• Support various Billing Patterns like “Bill To”, “Bill through”, “Bill on Behalf Of”, “Group Billing”, “Pre-Paid Billing”, “Post Paid Billing”, “Recurring / Subscription Billing”, etc.



• Support Customer centric billing including billing of cross Product-Line Bundles & Packages by enabling rapid configuration of Multi Level Billing Structures that represent different facets of a Customer’s relationship with an Enterprise. These structures should be able to support the Billing of Products, Static Product Bundles & Packages; with support for dynamic Bundling; support dynamic Customer level discounts and fee rebates too.



• Efficiently generate Invoices for 1000s of Customers & Accounts, spanning various divisions and lines of business. Provide easy-to-understand explanations for invoice amounts.



• Support sophisticated Partner Settlement Agreements that define various kinds of Partner Revenue share and Royalty Arrangements and their enforcement (“account-by-account revenue share” and “bulk volumes based revenue share”, etc).



• Enable non programmers to author and test billing definitions & logic through easy-to-use GUI tools. This can eliminate the delays and translation gaps associated with more traditional software development and change processes wherein business writes up detailed specifications documents and hands over to IT for programming.