Wholesale Billing Management

Wholesale Billing Management

The Wholesale billing management is a crucial aspect of Telecommunication industry.Wholesale billing management comprises supply of various kinds of services under a range of supply contracts with customers.The range of supply contracts with customers can include:

Formal billing dispute management
This contract has to be complied by both, the Wholesale supplier and the customer. This policy sets out a guideline about how most billing disputes can be managed.
The customers are carriers, service providers and Internet service providers.
The Wholesale supplier does not accept or deal directly with the end-users of its customers but addresses end-user billing disputes referred to it by an end-user’s service providers.

A customer-billing dispute can be an alleged inaccuracy, omission or error in relation to a charge on a bill, which falls into one or several billing dispute categories. Complaint about a disputed bill does not exempt an end-user from paying bill in a stipulated time frame as per contract guidelines. In specific circumstances, contract terms can allow withholding of the disputed amount until resolution of the dispute.
Billing dispute process timeframes are prescribed in clear business days for investigation and resolution. The timeframes are generally based on customers’ contractual terms and conditions.
An end-user can lodge billing dispute complaint by using a Wholesale billing dispute standard form, which can be downloaded from wholesale suppliers’ website or by sending an email to wholesale disputes and claims team.

Generic billing dispute categories are as follows:

Missing billing details in billing
A monthly invoice charges have been generated by a service that has been or should have been terminated.
Additional information about billing is missing.Discount calculation is missing or improper or in contrast to a discount plan.
Accounts unknown to Customer

Factors affecting concurrent Wholesale billing system:

Concurrent billing architecture
The current telecom industry is highly complex and the wholesale billing architecture should be flexible enough to support a wide range of various kinds of billing models on a single comprehensive platform. This platform should support complex agreements pertaining to revenue sharing.

New revenue resources
Wholesale billing systems must be able to provide full support for processing data and wide-ranging content apart from traditional voice traffic, for different complex multi-steps and multi-components rating rules. This requires the ability to account for non-usage events such as leased lines and facility rentals, as well as one-off charges for IP peering agreements. Operators need to deploy sophisticated cross product and cross-partner discounting features for the modeling of intricate business-to-business content settlement agreements.