Telecommunications billing is a significant component of any commercial communications service provider regardless specialization: telephone, mobile wireless communication, VoIP companies, mobile virtual network operators, internet service providers, transit traffic companies, cable television and satellite TV companies could not operate without billing, because it creates an economic value of their business.
Operations area includes functions of capturing usage records (depending on the industry it can be call detail records, charging data records, network traffic measurement data, in some cases usage data could be prepared by telecommunications mediation system), rating consumption (determining factors, significant for further calculation, for example, calculating total time of calls for each tariff zones, count of short messages, traffic summary in gigabytes), applying prices, tariffs, discounts, taxes and compiling charges for each customer account, rendering bills, managing bill delivery, applying adjustments, maintaining of customer account.
[3] Operations area functions implementation can vary significantly depending on communications type and payment model.
In postpaid service model there are no vital requirements to decrease a balance of a customer account in real time, in this case charging scheduled to be rarely, usually, once per month.
Term convergent billing system refers to such a solution, that could maintain single customer account and produce a single bill for all services (for example, it could be public switched telephone network, cable TV and cable internet services for one customer) and also do it regardless a payment method (prepaid or postpaid).