What is Billing?

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In several responses and replies to me in emails, people have wanted to know basic import on the terms on which this blog is based. So I will now attempt to answer these questions in this post as well as future posts. So Billing will be first term that I will try to address.

The Wikipedia and several other places on the net provide the different definitions for billing.
Let me attempt the turn of explaining this to you in a simple sequence from the inception of a business to the action of billing for initiating the chain or cycle of activities which help in recognizing the revenue of this business.

Say there is a need for some service/product which an individual, a group of individuals or a more specifically say a company /organization requires. So in absolutely bare terms and though there are more factors to it but in the minimalistic sense when the need for this service permeates beyond a critical number of individuals then the chance arises for a market to be created for this service.

Now this critical number is never a fixed number, it just cannot be. This number is recognized as demand defining threshold. And this threshold is the trigger which makes people having the resources, plan and knowhow to kind of satisfy this demand start taking notice of this demand.


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IT – Driver for Business Growth

Different functions like appropriate customer usage analysis, accurate and targeted surveys, envisioning new service offerings, innovative bundling and packaging, customer retention & loyalty enhancements, innovative marketing strategies provide us fodder to accentuate business growth.
I would like to add on my thoughts on this very purpose of business growth from an IT perspective.

In our Telco world we want to do wonderful things for both Business as well as Individual consumers – absolutely why not? but how many STABLE features of your underlying “system” are there to boot for your future visions.
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It’s All about Subscriptions

Well look around, Broadband internet – a fixed fee/month and unlimited usage, IP Telephony you pay a sum per month and that’s it , unlimited calls ,same for Cable TV. In some countries in prepaid Telco scenarios again for a subscription fee, you get to make and receive unlimited calls and even if not for all types of calls ,certain types of calls like local calls would definitely be unlimited.
Is this because competition on usage rating is not feasible anymore ? For example you can come with .001 units of currency theoretically saying 10 calls for .01 unit of currency but then there is no competition space left out in such cases between multiple players.
In India with the advent of new carries the bill boards are overflowing these days with who can give you everything in paisa and not a rupee but kind of when you weigh them side by side there is’nt much differentiation.
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Integrating CRM and Billing Systems

This would be one of the integral links in any enterprise level BSS Project chunk in a larger BSS/OSS implementation .Actually if you look at this topic from different angles you might see the picture differently depending upon the role you are playing in this integration. The roles can be the enterprise business analysts ,disparate vendors providing the CRM and Billing solutions in the form of off the shelve packages, IT backoffice team defining the IT backbone for the enterprise operations flow, Financial and Auditing teams, Executive management teams and several other teams who if not involved in giving shape to the integration output ,build their expectations of better business turnover in their silos based on the success of this integration.

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