Billing Cycle Management (FT-1001.010)

About this document

Scope

This document provides background information as well as a functional description of the FT-1001.010 Billing Cycle Management advanced feature. The described feature is supported from the release version 4.0 onwards.

Note

Billing Cycle Management is a standard feature and does not require a special license.

This feature is part of the Billing Cycle Management functionality with number FN-1015.

Feature Availability

Feature overview

Goals

The aim of the Billing Cycle Management feature is to allow Service Providers to define and manage a Billing Cycle to determine the start of the billing each month.

Functionality of the feature

Billing Cycle defines on which day billing starts each month.

In CMP, a Billing Cycle is always one month long and is recurring every month. A Billing Cycle Definition is assigned to each Account in CMP, to assign it to one of the available Billing Cycles.

CMP does support a total of 28 Billing Cycles, one for every day which exists in any month.

CMP executes one Billing Cycle Instance of each Billing Cycle Definition per month. Each cycle applies to all Accounts assigned to the related definition and automatically generates all types of costs (debit and credit) as configured in CMP.

The diagram below displays the basic schema of a Billing Cycle Instance, as well as the key phases during the process.

Note:

By default, CMP generates a PDF file for every Billing Cycle and Account, which either reflects the legal Invoice or just a summary of all costs.
It can also be configured to not generate a PDF at all, in case CMP is not used for the legal Invoice and providing a Billing Feed. This way, CMP can significantly reduce the Billing Cycle execution time and the file storage size.