Telecom Billing Process

Telecom Billing Process

Telecom billing process comprises provisioning the services within the billing system. importing the CDRs from various sources and then calculation of rates, billing and at last invoice generation.
In a nutshell Telecom billing is the process of gathering and grouping telecommunication service for specific accounts or customers, producing and sending invoices, and keeping records of payments made to customer accounts.
This diagram displays the basic functions of the CDR processing module of a billing system, such as how different event sources are received by the call processing system. These event sources can be from the network elements or from other companies that have provided services to customers. These records are normalized to a common CDR format understandable to the system and duplicate CDRs are eliminated. Identification information in each call detail record is used to match the record to an account in the customer database; For example, when two fields (pairs) are matched with each other, such as City and Zip Code in the system. The customer's information fetched in the system decides the rate plan to use in charge calculation. The rating database uses rate tables, the selected rate plan of the customer, and possibly other important information like distance etc. to calculate the actual charge for each individual call. This information is added in to the CDR and it is placed in the bill pool to generate the bill. If there are any issues with call processing, then the call detail records are sent to investigation for further analysis.