Money-based charge for Postpaid plans, non-prorated billing and automatic U.S. tax calculation are some BillRun’s newest cloud billing features. The latter enables our U.S. customers to add U.S. taxes and fees to customer bills. The system automatically calculates the combined sales and use tax rates, including the state rate plus any local tax rate imposed by a city, county, or school district, and applies the rate to every customer bill.
Money-based charge for Postpaid plans, non-prorated billing and automatic U.S. tax calculation are some BillRun’s newest cloud billing features. The latter enables our U.S. customers to add U.S. taxes and fees to customer bills. The system automatically calculates the combined sales and use tax rates, including the state rate plus any local tax rate imposed by a city, county, or school district, and applies the rate to every customer bill.
Money-based charge for Postpaid plans
This feature allows operators to define plans that are a combination of money-based and usage-based, for example: A plan can contain $10 in phone calls, and up to $2 of text messages. Or: 3 free calling hours, and $10 worth of text messages. Or: 2 hours of calling, and beyond that the customer is charged.
Automatic U.S. tax calculation
By engaging with Compliance Solutions Inc. - a U.S. company specializing in compliance solutions for telecom, including sales tax calculations - we have enabled our U.S. customers to add U.S. taxes and fees to customer bills. The system automatically calculates the combined sales and use tax rates, including the state rate plus any local tax rate imposed by a city, county, or school district, and applies the rate to every customer bill. This feature is intended for U.S. VOIP operators, mobile operators and ISPs, whereby customers calling from a certain destination need to be charged according to the specific tax rate, which normally involves highly complex calculations.
Non-prorated billing
This feature provides the option to define that a plan, service, or product will not be calculated as a prorated fee, but rather will be billed as a full month of service regardless of the signup date. For example, if a customer signed up for a $10/month plan on May 20th, and the billing cycle ends June 15th, they will be charged for a full month until June 15th, and for a full month thereafter in each recurring billing. Until recently, Prorated billing was the default billing method, by which the first recurring billing was prorated automatically from the signup date, and only starting from the second bill customers were charged for a complete month.
Manual refund by product volume
This feature enables operators to refund a customer who, for example, claims they were charged wrongly. The refund is implemented manually by a customer care rep, and the customer can view the refund in the monthly invoice in the format of minutes, converted into a dollar amount. Alternatively, operators can use this feature to manually charge a customer for a service, who, as a result of an error was not charged previously.
Billing cycle management
BillRun’s easy-to-use Billing cycle management provides the ability to perform all operations from a single screen, including the selection of the preferred day of the month when each billing cycle will be run. Using BillRun, running the billing cycle takes several hours for large enterprises, and for smaller companies it’s a matter of a few minutes, whereas in other programs these processes can last several days.
While the billing cycle is running, operators can view invoices, as they are generated by the system in real time, and also confirm individual- or all invoices. Once confirmed, the invoice becomes visible to customers. The system indicates what percentage of the billing cycle has been completed so far, providing an estimated time for completion. If an error is detected, operators can perform ‘rerun’ and once the error is corrected all the invoices are regenerated. Once the invoices are all generated and confirmed, automatic charging can begin.
