Charges, Suppliers, and Usage Rates
In the menu bar, by clicking on “Catalog” and then on “Categories”, you’ll be able to add a Charge. You can assign a Name to it and determine if it’s Commissionable and/or for Resale.
An IoT Billing Software must accommodate different suppliers. Here on the same page you can add the supplier name. It’s usually a Telecom carrier. Charge type can be One Time or Recurring. Then you enter a Price for this Charge. Price can be one of the two types; a Flat Fee or Per Unit. You may also enter a Cost for this charge.
Multi-lingual capabilities count in some regions and Canada is an example. You can assign English and French Billing Translations for this new charge.
Then you pick up to 5 Billing Identifiers that can include Username and Password. Smartbilling allows you to show or hide the Billing Identifiers on invoice – as very few of us want to publish a password on invoice. Another choice can be Circuit Number.
After creating a Product and a Charge, our Service is effectively created.
Maybe it’s a good time to take a break and look back at you have done so far.
Under Categories you can see the list of all categories that have been created till now and on the same line you can see how many Products, Charges and Services are included in that particular category. Depending on the Telecom BSS OSS that you are running you may see that there are 5 products, 7 charges and 10 services and by clicking on “10” – which is a live link indicating the number of included service – you are directed to a page listing all services under this category. Then by clicking on the name of a service (Let’s call it SVC-1300 for now) you’ll be directed to another page that shows all information regarding that service:
- Service’s name, category, billing period, and supplier
- Products included in that service
- Charges included in that service
- Usage Rates included in that service
Every commercial VOIP billing software needs a list of Usage Rates so it can calculate the invoices; so let’s add one. To add it you need to create it first so go back to Categories and click on Usage Rates and add it. Then enter information of the Usage Rate you are about to create:
- Rate type can be Bandwidth Overage amongst others. It can be also Cellular, Fax, Out of Bindle MMS (Minute), SMS Received (Message), or many other available types
- Rate Method Type can be Fixed, meaning that price is fixed per Gigabyte
- Supplier name
- Round Type that can be set up to round up – to make sure we don’t lose money
- Precision, which is the decimal position in order to round
- Rate and Cost per Gigabyte
- Tax Code that can be set to Canada, US, or other jurisdictions
- An option to enable or disable Commission
Usage Rate is created and now it has to be added. Go back to the Service and add the Usage Rate that you just created (Bandwidth Overage) to the Service.
Now you have it all; everything that a Saas Billing Platform’s Service needs under a Category: its own Products, Charges, and Usage Rates. You are much closer to a live service.
About Smartbilling:
Smartbilling is a cloud-based subscription billing and OSS for telecom industry.
Our software supports full customer life cycle and features a seamless quote to order to cash process.
Contact
Shane Dian
shaned@smartbox.ca