The complexity and role of a billing system are often underestimated. Billing must be correct and capable of rapid adaptation to changing business processes, irrespective of whether thousands or millions of transactions such as telephone calls, incidents of energy consumption, payment transactions or toll charges are billed every day.
For the development of a billing system It is essential to identify each individual business process whereas users simply expect a wide range of functionality and flexibility without re-defining established business processes, e.g. .
- What are the goods or services to be billed?
- Who is billing whom?
- What additional elements are there to the goods and services to be billed (fees, discounts etc.)?
- How quickly can changes to business processes be implemented?
This is what determines how quickly and individually your company can act and react in the market.
 Monthly billing is frequently your company's only consistent information platform for the end user. If billing is not prompt or even incorrect, then even the best accompanying advertising insert is of no use at all. The customer expects a great deal of a bill: It must be correct, it must have been compiled recently, it must be meaningful, and nowadays it must also be possible to access it via the Internet, and to reproduce it on demand even years later. Sophisticated customised discount systems and different payment options are expected as basic requirements.
Customer loyalty is not only achieved by means of a market-oriented price/performance ratio, but also in particular by a precise and transparent billing system. Your company is of course focussed on your business processes, with which it positions itself, acts and reacts in the market. What is essential is how quickly and individually products and services can be offered to the customer, but:
You can only offer what can also be billed.
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The IT manager is now faced with the actual challenges: to be able to implement business processes quickly and flexibly, to guarantee the technical requirements such as availability, performance and security, and to run the operation 24/7, unmanned if at all possible. However, an awful lot of requirements have to be implemented in order to ensure that a billing system can grow and change with the company, remaining flexible and scalable, running without crashing and delivering high performance, and at the same time working absolutely correctly:
Technical requirements: Speed is an expensive but necessary commodity throughout the world of business. That includes high availability (24/7) and high performance. Rapid adaptability to modified processes is also a feature necessary to guarantee short reaction times. But in addition to these aspects there is also a requirement for security (error tolerance, data protection, auditing security), reproducibility and transparency.
Technical problems in your billing system can very quickly lead to considerable costs for your company.
Operation: Operating costs are also incurred as a result of high demand on resources in the management of IT processes, monitoring and especially in the event of errors. Meaningful reporting, unmanned management and sophisticated error handling are essential aspects in the reduction of operating costs.
High costs resulting from errors and high operating costs can be significantly reduced by using a modern billing system.
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german
