Telecom Billing - Tariff Planning

In-Advance & In-Arrear Charges

There may be situation, when an operator would like to charge their customers in advance for some services and at the end of every month for some other services.

Charges taken in advance before providing the services are called in-advance charging and charges taken after providing the services are called in-arrear charges.

For in-arrears charging, the product charges are applied for a period up to at least the day before the current nominal bill date (or bill request date for non-periodic bills).

So while configuring different charges, billing system should give a provision to configure charges in advance and it is always optional for the operators if they want to configure a particular price in-advance or in-arrears.

NOTE − Usage charges can not be taken in advance until they are lump-sum because you never know how much usage a customer is going to generate in the coming month. If they are lump-sum amount, then you can take that amount in advance and let the customers use unlimited services based on their requirements.

Proratable & Non-Proratable Charges

Consider a situation, when a customer takes phone connection in the middle of the month and his invoice needs to be generated on the first day of every month. If prices are non-proratable, billing system would charge the customer for the whole, month which would not be fair with the customer. Same apply at the termination, if customer terminates a service in the middle of the month, then operator may not be willing to charge the customer for rest of the month.

Pro-ratable pricing means that they would apply only for the number of days customer is going to use the service. For example, if monthly product rental is $30 and customer used this product for 10 days only, then billing system should charge the customer only $10 for those 10 days.

So billing system should provide an option to configure the particular prices to be pro-ratable as well as non-proratable and let the operators choose what suites them best.

Refundable & Non-Refundable Charges

Now, let us consider a situation where an operator is charging a customer in advance for the whole month, but customer leaves in the middle of the month after using a service for 10 days.

If prices were configured as non-refundable, then they would not be refunded to the customer, but if they were configured as refundable, then they would be refunded to the customer. Second rule, if prices were configured as pro-ratable, then they would be refunded based on pro-ration, otherwise they would be refunded as a whole.

Charge Overriding Option

A good billing system provides an option to override base prices at the time they are given to the customer.

For example, for a particular product base prices in the catalogue are defined $30 per month but customer is not ready to pay $30 per month, and based on some bargaining, he is ready to pay $25 per month. In such a situation, customer service representative (CSR) should be able to override defined base price $30 and add them as $25 at the time of customer creation in the system.

Billing system should give an optional provision to the operators if a particular price can be overridden or not and let the operators decide if they want to override some charges at the time of sale or they are fixed in all the situation.

Revenue Segregation by Revenue Codes

All the operators would like to know how much they have earned using a particular product, its rental, suspension or usage, etc.

While defining different prices in the catalogue, billing system should give a provision to associate some kind of revenue codes or keywords with different types of charges. This helps in generating different reports based on the codes associated with the revenue.

Tariffs Classification

An operator may define different tariffs, which can be offered to different people having different credit classes. For example, a 5mbps data line at a cost of $100 per month can be offered to a customer having monthly income more than $1000/month and a 1mbps data line can be offered to a customer having minimum monthly income $500/month.

All the billing systems give options to define different credit classes, which can be assigned to customers based on their credit history and income and may be based on some other parameters defined by the operator.

All the products and services can have different tariff plans, which can be offered to different classes of people ranging from general class to VIP class.

Parameters for Usage Charges

There are number of parameters, which can be used while defining usage charges. For example −

Calls in daytime, usually called peak time, will be charged on higher rate and in night time, i.e., off peak time rate will be relatively low.
If calls are terminating within the same network, usually called on-net calls, would be charged at relatively low prices.
Calls during weekend, i.e., Sat and Sun would be charged at low prices.
Calls to a particular destination would be charged at high prices.
Calls during some festival would be charged at special prices.
Data download from a particular site would be free of cost.
Sending SMS to a particular code would be charged at high rate.
Calls within a particular group of numbers, usually called closed user group (CUG), would be charged at zero price.
Sending international or national MMS would be charged at the same prices.

Billing systems provide lots of flexibility to define various such rules to charge voice, data, SMS, or MMS usage generated by the customer.

What is next?

Now, we have all the products, services, and associated tariffs available in the billing system. In the next chapter, we will see how to sell these products to the end-users and create their records in the system.

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