Overview

Billing is built as a set of tasks for the Services Framework. These tasks are invoked when specific events happen in Common Services. Their purpose is to generate billing entries at the batch level for transmissions that are received by Gateway (inbound billing) and transmissions that are sent by Gateway (outbound billing). These entries are stored in a Billing table from which they can be exported to the customer's back end billing system. Billing can be associated with inbound and outbound products and other related add-on services. Billing components may consist of fixed or variable fees. Fixed fees can be charged at the daily, transmission, and batch levels. Variable fees are charged at the transaction level. Variable fees can have a set billing code or be tiered so that different transactions will have different billing codes. Each transaction is assigned a 4-digit billing service area and 5-digit billing code based on collection type, work type, billing tier, method of presentment, and, depending on the inbound product, transaction dollar amount.

Add-on services are additional options available in a product. An example of an add-on service for inbound is transaction repair for returns. For outbound, examples are archival, courtesy delivery, premium delivery, and transaction repair.

Billing records may contain transaction volumes and unit volumes. Transaction volumes refer to the number of fixed entities. Unit volume refers to the number of variable entities. Fixed billing records have transaction volumes with a unit volume of zero (0) and the variable billing records have a unit volume with a transaction volume of zero.

The billing codes are stored in a Billing table in the FTM database. Billing provides a task to extract the data from the Billing table and provides an XML formatted file for use by the customer's back end billing system.