Migrating from Billingbooth Classic
If you are migrating to Billingbooth One from an existing Billingbooth Classic account you will find that Billingbooth One feels very familiar, but it's important to note that there are some subtle but very important differences in the way some processes are done. This article explains some of the key differences between the platforms and how their behaviour will change your billing workflow.
Billing periods
In Billingbooth Classic the concept exists of active and pending charges. An active charge is effectively the charge schedule, instructing Billingbooth when and how often each charge should be billed. The result of this schedule comes out in the shape of a pending charge which is a ready-to-be-billed line item on an invoice. A pending charge cannot be billed until it's due date, so if a monthly recurring charge has a start date of the 9th, that charge cannot be billed until the 9th of each month.
In Billingbooth One charges are simplified by the use of billing periods when billing runs are issued. Each time a billing run is issued, a billing period is selected in the form of a month (e.g. April 2021). This tells Billingbooth One to include all charges that are applicable within the month of April, including charges that start in this month or that have recurring instances within the month.
With the introduction of billing periods it is now possible to bill charges in advance without waiting for the relevant date before doing so.
Voice, Data & SMS
The concept of uploading an individual CDR file, analysing and processing has now changed to a much more simplified "pool" model. Each CDR uploaded to Billingbooth One is automatically processed and added to a global pool of CDR records which can then be modified at any point to reflect the latest customer/destination matching. Filtering can be done by CDR file or a variety of other options.
As part of the pool model, you can re-bill call records as many times as you need to without having to re-upload CDR files - if modifications are needed then you can re-apply settings to a range of records and then re-issue a billing run.
Auto collection is now possible and is supported on a daily / hourly basis via FTP or SFTP.
Destinations now have separate buy price and sell price settings, with each side of the cost feeding in from CDRs or being set up manually. We have formalised the concept of catch all destinations which are now called "FallbacK" destinations which have their own check box setting.
Bundles
Configuration of bundles and applying them to customers is almost identical to the implementation in Billingbooth Classic with one key difference between that all applied bundles have a start date. All bundle periods are treated monthly and the start date dictates what that period is: If the start date is the 1st of a month then each full calendar month becomes the bundle period, but if the start date is the 15th then each bundle period is 15th of the month to the 14th of the following month. This allows for flexibility when working with anniversary day billing customers.
Products
The tariff system in Billingbooth One has been expanded and customers are now able to belong to one tariff per category. Each product is associated to a category and can have individual pricing for each tariff within that category.
Customers
The concept of parent/child customers has been removed from Billingbooth One. We are instead favouring using Cost Centres for breaking down charges by possible "child" billable entities. Due to this, Cost Centres can now have addresses as well as names.