A key market driver for communication service providers (CSPs) is post-paid billing accuracy. To ensure billing accuracy, Most CSPs have processes and teams to perform QA bills or test bill checks. This process is mostly manual where the Billing operations team provides the sample bills the Revenue Assurance team validates the test bills manually and sends in observations/issues back to the Operations team.

The billing operations/support team goes through each issue and manually does calculation from the billing system based on the customer’s product/rate plan and gives feedback to the RA team.

Business Challenge

Ensuring a sampling size that covers most billing scenarios is a challenge and the possibility of revenue leaks or overcharging are high in this process.

Approach/Solution

Knot Solutions implemented a solution that automated test bill runs (proforma invoice) by:

• Providing a fully automated suite right from test bill sampling, test bill generation, validation and generation of exception reports.
• Allowing Revenue Assurance and finance teams to add new rules to their test/QA bill validation through the user-configurable rules engine.
• Having a centralized system for all QA bill validation workflow and ensuring all issues are tracked, monitored and taken to closure.
• Providing an independent product configurator portal for product configuration used for charges calculation and validation with bills.
• Allowing the RA team to have better sampling coverage by increasing the sample size for each bill run.
• Reducing the costs due to elimination of manual efforts both within IT and RA teams.
• Reducing the time needed for CG bill validation allowing CSPs to commit improved SLAs for end-to-end bill generation and dispatch.
• Facilitating earlier realization of revenue due to smaller QA billing windows.
• Automate selection of sample customers based on criteria entered by the user.

Output/Benefits

• The time for sampling, generation and validation of QA invoices before the real bill run was reduced by 60% following the implementation of these tools.
• Efforts spent by the revenue assurance team towards QA Bill validation reduced by 70% and sampling size increased from 500 to 5000.