Cost & Billing

The Cost & Billing Solution provides financial visibility into your operations by linking financial information to operational activities. It calculates both the internal cost and the customer-facing billing of operational activities, based on contracts and rate cards defined within the application.

With the Cost & Billing Solution, you can:

• Manage customer contracts, including validity periods, uplifts, discounts, rounding rules, and the applicable billing rate cards.
• Manage cost and billing rate cards, defining both the cost of operational activities and the charges billed to customers, with support for rules such as minimum time intervals, minimum increments, and capped rates.
• Work with multiple currencies by defining value units and exchange rates relative to a nominal value unit in which all final results are expressed.
• Synchronize the operational inventory, including items, groups, and billable events from external systems through adapters.
• Calculate costs and billable charges for billable events at any stage of their lifecycle, and freeze the results when they are ready to be finalized.

The solution is designed to be flexible and can be extended:

• The Cost & Billing Solution currently focuses on time-based cost and billing only. Its model, however, is flexible enough to support other billing models. For this, the solution needs to be expanded, for example with subscription contract and rate card definitions.
• The solution includes a sample integration with MediaOps Plan and can be extended to integrate with other external solutions. For details, refer to Integration with other solutions.

Tip

For a detailed description of how the components fit together, refer to Cost & Billing architecture. To get started, see Installing Cost & Billing.