Figure C.11 - Billing Entities Overview

A typical billing process involves collecting business transaction details from network equipment, application servers and various other sources, correlating and formatting collected transaction details into billable events that a billing system can understand, guiding (associating usage to customer products), assigning charges to each billable event, applying other fees and discounts, applying taxes, and aggregating everything into customer bills (invoices) and receiving and recording payments from customers.<br/>This model is not focused on any specific business domain but rather tries to build a model framework into which models for different billing domains would fit (for example, telecom billing, utilities billing). It also supports all three basic billing types: postpaid periodical billing, postpaid real-time billing and prepaid real-time billing. The model, by no means, represents the complete set of bill elements that can be incurred. The model provides a framework into which other types of bill elements can easily fit.<br/>The overview figure below shows a simplified overview of the main billing domain business entities. The text following the figure provides an explanation of each of the figure’s entities.<br/>