Billing System Overview

[VOIPoTim]

Here is some general information about how our billing system works. I know there have been some interesting concepts with VoIP billing in the past.

This system was developed entirely in-house to function in these ways and there are really 3 overall goals:

1) Provide an easy billing experience based on common sense.

2) Limit our costs of billing (like transaction fees with unnecessary charges) so we can keep costs low.

3) Limit risk and fraud again so we can keep costs low.

This is somewhat rambling, but I've outlined some points:

Renewal Date

This is the date your package renews. On a yearly package, this would be 12 months from signup. On a monthly package, this would be monthly.

Billing Date

This is your MONTHLY billing date. All accounts regardless of package term have a monthly billing date for international charges, etc. It’s always the anniversary.
If you signup on the 17th, your monthly billing date will always be the 17th.

Example – Brendan orders a yearly package on the March 6, 2008. Brendan’s account would have a renewal date of March 6, 2009 and a billing date of the 6th each month.

Taxes/Fees

Any applicable taxes/fees such as USF Recovery, E911 Fees, etc will be billed with your plan renewal. This means that if you have a yearly plan, you’ll pay a year of fees with it instead of having them billed seperated. In that case, you would only see charges on your monthly billing date if you had international calls or something special going on.

Credit Limit

For 99% of customers, this is a behind the scenes thing. A lot of companies have this in place as a manual process already, but since it rarely affects anyone you don’t hear about it much. All accounts will be assigned an internal credit limit. This is essentially the limit for “unbilled charges” in your account (primarily with international). Once you hit this credit limit, you will not be able to make additional billable calls (such as international) until your account is zero’d out again either on your billing date OR by making a manual payment. This is adjustable per account and applies across the board to residential, business, carrier, etc. This helps us limit fraud and keep pricing low.

Prepayments/Manual Payments

Our sytem is entirely balance based. You will be able to make a manual payment anytime from within vPanel. This would just be applied to your account.
So say you have a 6 month term, but you know you’d like to make some international calls sometime and don’t want to see additional monthly charges for them. You could add $10 to your account and it’d just sit there as a credit on your account and would offset any new charges.

[usa2k]

Credit Limit

Maybe a soft-limit, hard-limit approach would be a good idea?
An email could be sent asking for a payment before running out?
(Say by 80% of the limit?)

Or setup authorized CC automated billing for ever $100 in extras?

Just thinking . . .

The threshold could be raised over time based on succesful transactions.
Some companies have CC thresholds, and you will need to bill in increments anyway.

[usa2k]

Prepayments/Manual Payments

Vonage seemed to be balance based - that is a good system.
Referral credits would add to the balance (the few I had.)