December 15, 2000. Moscow
AMSD Billing System
AMSD BillingSystem™ was developed to support IP telephony systems, for instance, like AMSD TalkServer™. It provides high-grade maintenance of granting Internet-telephony service.
AMSD BillingSystem™ uses Misrosoft SQL Server technology.
AMSD BillingSystem™ provides users authorization and control, services and payments accounting, implements a common database containing client data. Several different software units may be connected to AMSD BillingSystem™ and each of then can access the database.
Accounts control, PIN codes, tariff plans, downpayments and commercial credit are supported.
AMSD BillingSystem™ has an open interface for external software extensions.
The following functions are implemented in AMSD BillingSystem™:
- Registration of new billing system users;
- Users authentification;
- PINs suppord;
- User accounts keeping;
- Team accounts keepong (several PINs associated with one account);
- User autodetection (incoming call telephone number detectors supported);
AMSD BillingSystem™ uses PINs for users authentification and accounts control.
AMSD BillingSystem™ enables a team account feature, i.e. several PIN codes associated with one account. Thus, one PIN and one account may be used by different users. The account contains user personal data, account balance and other data used by the billing system.
AMSD BillingSystem™ uses telephone number detection for automatic user authentification. An automatic number detector (AND) detects where the client's dialing from and check his access privilege, i.e. which telephone number (or which IP) the client uses and which registration key the client may use. The telephone number stands for an additional parameter to PIN and password.
- pricing zones creation and operation;
- working with tariff plans using pricing zones;
- pricing policy configuration;
- flexible price list update (adding and editing available services);
AMSD BillingSystem™ enables multifunctional tariff plans support, including creating, updating and merging pricing plans according to the client's requirements.
The tariff (pricing) plan defines the calculation procedure for the price of a certain service. It depends on the type of the service, the time of the day, the day of the week, calendar (holidays) and territory (region). AMSD BillingSystem™ enables building pricing plans according to these parameters. Each service's cost may be set in the pricing plan.
AMSD BillingSystem™ allows to use pricing zones and countries with certain holiday schedules in building pricing plans. "Pricing zone" stands for one or more regions grouped by similar service costs. "Country" stands for a group of regions with similar holiday and weekend calendar. It means that "country" in AMSD BillingSystem™ is not the same as "country" in international law. For instance, if there are local holidays in a certain region, it's necessary to define a separate "country" for it.
AMSD BillingSystem™ allows to change or add a pricing plan at any moment. You can set the date of such an update prematurely; then the old pricing plan will function before the estimated date and the new one will start functioning after it. Out-dated pricing plans are kept for reports building. Pricing plans may differ even between separate clients.
- granting both single-time and periodical services;
- downpayment;
- commercial credit;
- flexible discount support;
- voice menu (for clients using phones);
- warning on low account balance.
AMSD BillingSystem™ offers the following service categories:
Single-time services (for instance, account opening, pricing plan change, optional account locking etc.);
Periodical services (for instance, e-mailing reports on account balance and cash flow for a certain period of time). The payment is performed once a period;
Time-evaluated services (for instance, a telephone call). The price may depend on time of the day, day of the year and the region. Thus, the payment if performed once for each call.
Payments can be performed both by invoicing and prematurely (using downpayment or a prepaid card).
The billing system controls the client's balance in real time ( "hot billing" technology). The client's balance is kept from overdraft (up to discontinuing an active talk session).
Clients can use a www-interface to monitor their account balance and perform payments using credit cards. Providers can use the same interface to control their clients' accounts.
The billing system has a voice menu, allowing phone-using clients access their accounts.
- through record-keeping on all the invoices and other billing system objects;
- session logging;
- forming detailed invoices for all types and subtypes of available services;
The billing system allows to get both overall reports and invoices for single clients.
AMSD BillingSystem™ creates and constantly updates logs containing cash flow and other necessary information.
The billing system offers a flexible procedure of adding new report templates both by its producers and its users (providers).
Moreover, reports can be saved in the DB in HTML format for later reuse. This mechanism reduces the frequency of DB accessing. In this case the recalculation process can be run during the time of lower billing system use.
- flexible access rights setup for each client;
- keeping clients data in a DB;
- controlling both access to data and access to system functions;
- data autobackup;
- data restoration.
AMSD BillingSystem™ supports its own centralized DB which enables access to common pricing plans, clients and accounts. The records from the database are periodically backed up in order to maintain its maximum integrity in case of server failure and other unpredictable ("force majeure") circumstances.
- setting and editing tax rates;
- adding new and deleting old taxes;
- adding new tax calculation procedures;
- taxation in any currency support;
- accounts in any currency support.
The system's ability to support different currencies add taxation systems, flexible rates setup act as prerequisites to easy system portability.
The following data selections are available for traffic monitoring and analisys:
- by time of the day;
- by a set of channels (lines);
- by regions or countries;
- by lowest and highest channel load.
All these characteristics are stored in the DB; they are all available as selection parameters. This allows to estimate channel quality (speed, delays and data losses) and (according to the results) evaluate and optimize total costs.
For instance, resource usage estimation can help to evaluate the effectiveness of gateway usage. The analysis can also reveal which channels are overloaded at a certain time of the day or which channels suffer data loss more than others.