Subscription Management Glossary of Terms
Account Hierarchy
An n-Tier Account Hierarchy provides multiple levels of account hierarchy. Hierarchies can be provided for reporting purposes only or involve more complexity by extending the hierarchy structure to all elements within an application. Connect:SM's n-tier account hierarchy structure is available system-wide to support both reporting and operational activities such as billing. Data security and access, billing and payments, branding, and other items all can be set within the hierarchy structure to limit how and what can be done, accessed or displayed.
Accounting System
An accounting system is an integrated suite of software that typically includes general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, as well as specialty modules for things such as fixed asset tracking, cash management, expense management, purchasing, order management and others. An accounting system is recommended in addition to using Connect:SM for billing, but it is not a substitute. Connect:SM integrates with popular accounting systems such as Quickbooks, Great Plains, Solomon, Intaact, Netsuite, Oracle, SAP, and others for submitting transactional data to the general ledger, accounts payable, inventory, cash management, payroll, and other modules. Connect:SM provides the ability to relate general ledger account codes to product catalog items and other transaction generating items such as payment methods to track accounting transactions in Connect:SM and provide a batch file transfer process for loading completed transactions into the accounting system. Additionally, Connect:SM provides revenue codes that can be used for revenue tracking and analysis and in the revenue recognition process.
Abandoned Registration
An abandoned registration is when a prospective customer decides not to complete the process to become a new customer. Two steps to convert these prospective customers into active customers are to ask for a valid email address in the first step of the registration process when you ask for customer name and other identifying information. The second step is to re-market to these prospects. Your Customer Life-cycle Billing solution should enable you to save abandoned registrations and run reports that allow outbound sales representatives to proactively contact these prospects and turn them into active customers.
Accounts Receivable
Once an invoice is produced and sent to a customer for payment an accounts receivable transaction is created. Connect:SM enables you to fine-tune the accounts receivable process through filters, configurable workflow, and flexible reporting so you can segment your customers by credit risk, customer value, customer type, and other factors.
ACH
Automated Clearing House (ACH) is an electronic network for financial transactions in the United States. ACH direct debit transfers include consumer payments on insurance premiums, mortgage loans, and other kinds of bills. Debit transfers also include new applications such as the Point-of-Purchase (POP) check conversion pilot program sponsored by NACHA-The Electronic Payments Association. Businesses are also increasingly using ACH to collect from customer's online, rather than accepting credit or debit cards.
Address Verification
Address verification is an external service that validates the address information input by your customer and will prompt your customer to enter correct information before proceeding. Two types of verification services are available. Payment processors for credit card transactions provide this as an optional service to merchants to help ensure the address input matches with the address on the credit card account in order to reduce fraudulent transactions. The second type of service is available from 3rd parties, such as TargusInfo, and can be used on all address related transactions to ensure valid address information is provided.
Aggregators
Aggregators bring together products and services from several disparate sources and package them into product or service bundles for their customers. This makes it easier for customers to get access to these services or products by eliminating the need to deal with multiple suppliers. Often the aggregator also adds value to the services or products through innovative pricing, packaging, and complementary functionality. In the Voice 2.0 market, aggregators make affordable expensive telecom services by repackaging the telecom services acquired from carriers into affordable offerings for Voice 2.0 application developers.
APIs
Application Programming Interface (API)s is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications. Connect:SM provides web services based APIs for all core platform functionality including customer, billing, provisioning and inventory logic.
AR classes
AR classes enable you to categorize your accounts receivable customers. This can be to use for risk management, personalization, and other business factors.
ARPU
Average Revenue Per Unit is a measure of the revenue generated per user or unit. This measure allows for the analysis of a companies revenue generation and growth at the per unit level, which can identify which products are high or low revenue-generators.
Authorize.Net
Authorize.Net , a CyberSource solution, is a payment gateway service provider allowing merchants to accept credit card and electronic checks payments through their website.
Auto-pay
Auto-pay is the automation of the end-to-end payment process. Subscriptions and other recurring revenue transactions that are setup to be paid by credit card, debit card, or ACH are typically configured for auto-pay processing. On the billing date, auto-pay transactions are automatically generated and send to the various 3rd party payment processors. Successful transactions are posted as payments to the account and unsuccessful transactions are placed into exception handling queues for further action. Flexible reporting and automated workflow processes ensure exception handling is performed effectively and efficiently.
An n-Tier Account Hierarchy provides multiple levels of account hierarchy. Hierarchies can be provided for reporting purposes only or involve more complexity by extending the hierarchy structure to all elements within an application. Connect:SM's n-tier account hierarchy structure is available system-wide to support both reporting and operational activities such as billing. Data security and access, billing and payments, branding, and other items all can be set within the hierarchy structure to limit how and what can be done, accessed or displayed.
Accounting System
An accounting system is an integrated suite of software that typically includes general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, as well as specialty modules for things such as fixed asset tracking, cash management, expense management, purchasing, order management and others. An accounting system is recommended in addition to using Connect:SM for billing, but it is not a substitute. Connect:SM integrates with popular accounting systems such as Quickbooks, Great Plains, Solomon, Intaact, Netsuite, Oracle, SAP, and others for submitting transactional data to the general ledger, accounts payable, inventory, cash management, payroll, and other modules. Connect:SM provides the ability to relate general ledger account codes to product catalog items and other transaction generating items such as payment methods to track accounting transactions in Connect:SM and provide a batch file transfer process for loading completed transactions into the accounting system. Additionally, Connect:SM provides revenue codes that can be used for revenue tracking and analysis and in the revenue recognition process.
Abandoned Registration
An abandoned registration is when a prospective customer decides not to complete the process to become a new customer. Two steps to convert these prospective customers into active customers are to ask for a valid email address in the first step of the registration process when you ask for customer name and other identifying information. The second step is to re-market to these prospects. Your Customer Life-cycle Billing solution should enable you to save abandoned registrations and run reports that allow outbound sales representatives to proactively contact these prospects and turn them into active customers.
Accounts Receivable
Once an invoice is produced and sent to a customer for payment an accounts receivable transaction is created. Connect:SM enables you to fine-tune the accounts receivable process through filters, configurable workflow, and flexible reporting so you can segment your customers by credit risk, customer value, customer type, and other factors.
ACH
Automated Clearing House (ACH) is an electronic network for financial transactions in the United States. ACH direct debit transfers include consumer payments on insurance premiums, mortgage loans, and other kinds of bills. Debit transfers also include new applications such as the Point-of-Purchase (POP) check conversion pilot program sponsored by NACHA-The Electronic Payments Association. Businesses are also increasingly using ACH to collect from customer's online, rather than accepting credit or debit cards.
Address Verification
Address verification is an external service that validates the address information input by your customer and will prompt your customer to enter correct information before proceeding. Two types of verification services are available. Payment processors for credit card transactions provide this as an optional service to merchants to help ensure the address input matches with the address on the credit card account in order to reduce fraudulent transactions. The second type of service is available from 3rd parties, such as TargusInfo, and can be used on all address related transactions to ensure valid address information is provided.
Aggregators
Aggregators bring together products and services from several disparate sources and package them into product or service bundles for their customers. This makes it easier for customers to get access to these services or products by eliminating the need to deal with multiple suppliers. Often the aggregator also adds value to the services or products through innovative pricing, packaging, and complementary functionality. In the Voice 2.0 market, aggregators make affordable expensive telecom services by repackaging the telecom services acquired from carriers into affordable offerings for Voice 2.0 application developers.
APIs
Application Programming Interface (API)s is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications. Connect:SM provides web services based APIs for all core platform functionality including customer, billing, provisioning and inventory logic.
AR classes
AR classes enable you to categorize your accounts receivable customers. This can be to use for risk management, personalization, and other business factors.
ARPU
Average Revenue Per Unit is a measure of the revenue generated per user or unit. This measure allows for the analysis of a companies revenue generation and growth at the per unit level, which can identify which products are high or low revenue-generators.
Authorize.Net
Authorize.Net , a CyberSource solution, is a payment gateway service provider allowing merchants to accept credit card and electronic checks payments through their website.
Auto-pay
Auto-pay is the automation of the end-to-end payment process. Subscriptions and other recurring revenue transactions that are setup to be paid by credit card, debit card, or ACH are typically configured for auto-pay processing. On the billing date, auto-pay transactions are automatically generated and send to the various 3rd party payment processors. Successful transactions are posted as payments to the account and unsuccessful transactions are placed into exception handling queues for further action. Flexible reporting and automated workflow processes ensure exception handling is performed effectively and efficiently.
Balance Management
Balance management involves prepaying for services or goods, or authorizing credit for an account. Balance management capabilities enable companies to enlarge the audience for their products and services, as well as accepting micro-transactions. Balance management involves authorizing transactions in real-time by verifying the account has sufficient funds or credit to complete the transaction. Configurable thresholds enable companies to decide how much credit to extend and when an account needs to be refreshed. Business rules should also be available to dictate the proper handling of situations such as how to handle a transaction request that would cause the threshold to be exceeded.
Bandwidth Pricing
The common subscription and usage charge model involves flat rate tiered pricing based on gigabytes with tiered overage charges when the gigabyte limit is exceeded in a billing period. Next-generation usage charge models enable consumption-based pricing which meter actual usage and types of usage. This enables companies to charge bandwidth by type of usage such as a video stream, or apply more creative tiered pricing models such as time of day, day of week, and the like.
Billing Automation
Billing automation encompasses the order-to-cash process. Order-to-cash refers to the workflow in which a customer places an order, either via a website or through a sales rep, provision of the service, generation of an invoice, and finally collection of payment for that invoice. Order-to-cash is a recurring, ongoing process in a subscription business.
Billing Mediation
A billing mediation platform is a system used to convert datatypes of a certain type to other datatypes, usually for billing purposes. Typically a mediation platform is used for the following tasks - collection and validation of event records, filtering out of non billing-relevant event records, collating, correlation of different input sources event records, aggregation of partial event records related to the same transaction, format change and event record normalization, and business transformation of data. These processes can be done in real-time and/or batch mode from multiple input sources. Refer to the Usage Processing web page for more information.
Billing-as-a-Service (BaaS)
Billing-as-a-Service is another name for billing delivered as software-as-a-service. The fully hosted hardware/software environment benefits the customer in that there is no expensive hardware infrastructure to deploy, no costly upfront software licenses, maintenance contracts or product upgrade fees to pay, rather the customer pays a subscription fee to access their own copy of the software via a standard internet browser.
Branding
Customers want to be able to custom brand their customer facing billing screens and often also want to do the same for their back office billing screens to better reflect their image and identity. Connect:SM provides the capability to control logo placement, colors, fonts, and other screen layout options to make is easy for customers to achieve that individual look and feel.
Bundle
A product bundle represents combining products and/or services that are sold standalone into a single sales unit. For example, selling a PC with a printer, and pre-loaded with popular business software could be considered a bundle. Offering a single price for a cable TV subscription, phone service subscription, and internet access subscription could also be considered a bundle.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
BillWise offers business process outsourcing arrangements for the daily operating tasks associated with billing. Our "soft landing" service is common with new customers because BillWise takes responsibility for operating the billing system for an agreed upon period of time from initial launch, then during this time transitions daily responsibilities to the customer's billing staff. This arrangement is also favorable to companies looking at controlling costs and wanting to focus their resources on more high-value core activities for their businesses.
Business Rules
Business rules are externalized from application code because they change more frequently than the rest of the application code. The Business Rules Engine is the software component that executes business rules that have been defined by each individual customer. This allows the business users to modify the rules frequently without the need of IT intervention and hence allows the applications to be more adaptable with the dynamic rules. Connect:SM's Platform includes a Business Rules Engine that enables business users to define rules for many activities such as pricing, dunning, billing, and others. It is often used in conjunction with the Workflow Engine so that once a rule is executed it triggers one or more workflow processes such as dunning notices if a payment is late.
Business Support System (BSS)
Business support systems (BSS) are the components that a communications service provider uses to run its customer facing business operations. BSS and OSS platforms are linked or integrated support various end to end communications services. A BSS solution typically covers taking of orders, payment issues, and revenues. The role of business support systems in a service provider covers four main areas - product management, customer management, revenue management, and order management. The term OSS most frequently describes "network systems" dealing with the voice, broadband, or video network(s), supporting processes such as maintaining network inventory, provisioning services, configuring network components, and managing faults.
Balance management involves prepaying for services or goods, or authorizing credit for an account. Balance management capabilities enable companies to enlarge the audience for their products and services, as well as accepting micro-transactions. Balance management involves authorizing transactions in real-time by verifying the account has sufficient funds or credit to complete the transaction. Configurable thresholds enable companies to decide how much credit to extend and when an account needs to be refreshed. Business rules should also be available to dictate the proper handling of situations such as how to handle a transaction request that would cause the threshold to be exceeded.
Bandwidth Pricing
The common subscription and usage charge model involves flat rate tiered pricing based on gigabytes with tiered overage charges when the gigabyte limit is exceeded in a billing period. Next-generation usage charge models enable consumption-based pricing which meter actual usage and types of usage. This enables companies to charge bandwidth by type of usage such as a video stream, or apply more creative tiered pricing models such as time of day, day of week, and the like.
Billing Automation
Billing automation encompasses the order-to-cash process. Order-to-cash refers to the workflow in which a customer places an order, either via a website or through a sales rep, provision of the service, generation of an invoice, and finally collection of payment for that invoice. Order-to-cash is a recurring, ongoing process in a subscription business.
Billing Mediation
A billing mediation platform is a system used to convert datatypes of a certain type to other datatypes, usually for billing purposes. Typically a mediation platform is used for the following tasks - collection and validation of event records, filtering out of non billing-relevant event records, collating, correlation of different input sources event records, aggregation of partial event records related to the same transaction, format change and event record normalization, and business transformation of data. These processes can be done in real-time and/or batch mode from multiple input sources. Refer to the Usage Processing web page for more information.
Billing-as-a-Service (BaaS)
Billing-as-a-Service is another name for billing delivered as software-as-a-service. The fully hosted hardware/software environment benefits the customer in that there is no expensive hardware infrastructure to deploy, no costly upfront software licenses, maintenance contracts or product upgrade fees to pay, rather the customer pays a subscription fee to access their own copy of the software via a standard internet browser.
Branding
Customers want to be able to custom brand their customer facing billing screens and often also want to do the same for their back office billing screens to better reflect their image and identity. Connect:SM provides the capability to control logo placement, colors, fonts, and other screen layout options to make is easy for customers to achieve that individual look and feel.
Bundle
A product bundle represents combining products and/or services that are sold standalone into a single sales unit. For example, selling a PC with a printer, and pre-loaded with popular business software could be considered a bundle. Offering a single price for a cable TV subscription, phone service subscription, and internet access subscription could also be considered a bundle.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
BillWise offers business process outsourcing arrangements for the daily operating tasks associated with billing. Our "soft landing" service is common with new customers because BillWise takes responsibility for operating the billing system for an agreed upon period of time from initial launch, then during this time transitions daily responsibilities to the customer's billing staff. This arrangement is also favorable to companies looking at controlling costs and wanting to focus their resources on more high-value core activities for their businesses.
Business Rules
Business rules are externalized from application code because they change more frequently than the rest of the application code. The Business Rules Engine is the software component that executes business rules that have been defined by each individual customer. This allows the business users to modify the rules frequently without the need of IT intervention and hence allows the applications to be more adaptable with the dynamic rules. Connect:SM's Platform includes a Business Rules Engine that enables business users to define rules for many activities such as pricing, dunning, billing, and others. It is often used in conjunction with the Workflow Engine so that once a rule is executed it triggers one or more workflow processes such as dunning notices if a payment is late.
Business Support System (BSS)
Business support systems (BSS) are the components that a communications service provider uses to run its customer facing business operations. BSS and OSS platforms are linked or integrated support various end to end communications services. A BSS solution typically covers taking of orders, payment issues, and revenues. The role of business support systems in a service provider covers four main areas - product management, customer management, revenue management, and order management. The term OSS most frequently describes "network systems" dealing with the voice, broadband, or video network(s), supporting processes such as maintaining network inventory, provisioning services, configuring network components, and managing faults.
Chargeback
A chargeback occurs when a buyer asks their credit card company to remove a charge from their credit card statement. The credit card company will ask the buyer to provide an explanation about why they are disputing the charge. Two common reasons for chargebacks are - the buyer's credit card number is stolen and used fraudulently, and the buyer makes a purchase, but believes that the seller failed to fulfill their side of the agreement. Certain laws and credit card issuer policies usually allow buyers to file chargebacks weeks or sometimes months after the initial transaction occurs which creates complication for the merchant. Connect:SM automates the credit card process and provides rules driven options for handling credit card exceptions such as chargebacks. This enables the merchant to intelligently manage large volumes of credit card transactions and stay on top of potential chargeback problems in an efficient and cost effective manner.
Change Order
A Change Order represents any subsequent order to the initial sales order for an individual account. The Change Order may involve a new service order, a work order, a trouble ticket, or an upgrade or downgrade in subscription plan.
Churn
A measure of customer attrition, calculated as the number of customers who discontinue service during a specified time period, divided by the total number of customers at the start of that period. Churn is an operational metric used to gauge the overall health of a subscription business. Churn is measured in units or dollars. For companies that offer multiple services or products, Churn may be measured at the customer level or at the product or service level so that the business can get insight into whether customers are churning to other service providers, as well as whether customers are churning on certain services or products. Once a Churn trend is identified the business should seek to analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to investigate the underlying cause for the Churn such as a competitive pricing threat, customer service issue, quality issue, etc.
Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC)
In the United States, a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) is a telephone company that competes with the already established local telephone business by providing its own network and switching. The term distinguishes new or potential competitors from established local exchange carriers (LECs) and arises from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was intended to promote competition among both long-distance and local phone service providers. Besides pure CLECs competing locally or regionally with Verizon and AT&T, many Cable MSOs have been CLECs as part of their offering digital phone service to their customers. Issues such as carrier access billing (CABS), and others are important to CLECs and often are areas of concern for revenue leakage. Connect:SM for Communications helps carriers reconcile and settle their inter-carrier charges, as well as provides the reporting insight needed to spot issues before they become big problems.
Cloud Commerce
Cloud Commerce refers to conducting revenue generating business through the Cloud. Profit-minded companies that have SaaS offerings that run in the Cloud are examples of businesses conducting Cloud Commerce. The web designers and developers that build these SaaS applications are commonly referred to as "cloud developers". The Cloud Commerce revenue model generally is based on using subscription plans, one-time charges, and in some cases, usage charges. See Cloud Computing for additional information.
Cloud Computing
Typical cloud computing services provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser or through APIs, while the software and data are stored on the servers. These services include - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoid capital expenditures by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offerings employ the utility computing model, which is similar to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, whereas others bill on a subscription basis.
Communications Service Provider (CSP)
A Communications Service Provider (CSP) is a company in the telecom (landline and wireless), Internet, cable, satellite, or managed services business that transports information electronically over one or more types of networks (voice, data, or video). Communication service provider often specialize in certain industries, such as telecommunications, entertainment and media, and Internet/Web services. Many communication service providers, such as cable companies, FTTH providers, CLECs, and RBOCS have branched into multiple communications services including voice, broadband, and broadcast television. Each type of communications service has its own technical infrastructure that historically has required CSPs to use multiple communications billing systems to handle the unique provisioning and billing requirements of the service. Modern communications billing systems, like Connect:SM for Communications, are convergent service billing solutions that handle all types of services through one billing solution.
Competitive Differentiation
Competitive differentiation occurs when a firm somehow differentiates its product or service from that of competitors. Competitive differentiation may be an actual difference, such as a longer warranty or a lower price, or a perceived difference generated through things such as advertising and marketing promotions. A familiar example was the Sprint Family Plan which was enabled by the flexibility of Sprint's billing system to provide packaging, pricing, and order management for unique offer that AT&T could not match because of the rigidity of their billing system. Connect:SM provides the flexibility across it's functionality to enable customers to create competitive differentiation for their businesses.
Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce
BillWise's Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce is a leading Subscription Billing and Recurring Payments solutions. The integrated, end-to-end system provides functionality to manage customers, orders, products, inventory, billing, payments, as well as support marketing and provide integration to other critical business applications. Different editions are available to address the varying degrees of complexity and scale represented by the diverse businesses of our customers. They are Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise. It is available as a SaaS offering with optional managed services.
Connect:SM Private Label
Connect:SM Private Label Billing refers to BillWise's reseller program. Under the program, 3rd party developers and application providers can private label Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce or Connect:SM for Communications under their brand name and resell subscription billing and recurring payment processing services to their customers. The program generally takes one of two forms. The first is the more traditional VAR model where Connect:SM is sold along side the reseller's existing application as an integrated extension. The second form, is creating a new business application on top of the Connect:SM platform and taking that into a particular market. Both approaches are excellent ways for entrepreneurs to add value to their existing business, open new markets, and extend their reach within growing vertical markets. Refer to the Private Label Billing web pages for more details and examples.
Connect:SM for Communications
BillWise's Connect:SM for Communications provides convergent communications service billing capabilities for small and mid-market communications service providers such as Cable MSOs. Built on the Connect:SM platform, it includes those capabilities unique to communications service providers delivering voice, broadband, wireless, and/or video services to their customers. Different editions are available to address the varying degrees of complexity and scale. It is available as a SaaS offering, managed service offering, or in traditional license form.
Connect4Billing
Connect4Billing is the name of BillWise's blog site and Connect4Billing.com is BillWise's customer website for accessing Connect:SM and interacting with BillWise for customer support.
Consumption Pricing
Pricing a service or item based on actual consumption of a given product or service, rather than a flat rate for a given service or period of time. Connect:SM supports any unit of measurement for pricing. Examples of when usage-based pricing is used include, cloud computing, data center services for bandwidth, streaming video, content consumption, broadband data usage, wired and wireless telephony, VoIP, conference services, SMS, WiFi/WiMax internet access, electricity usage, water usage, gaming, machine time usage, and many other applications. Connect:SM supports both file-based usage records and streaming usage. Usage can be processed real-time or in batch mode. Certain applications may require BillWise's advanced multi-service real-time, rules-based rating engine.
Corporate Accounts
Corporations often involve special contract and invoicing requirements. Multiple levels of hierarchy such as departments, locations, subsidiaries, and the like might impose special product availability, pricing, order authorization, billing, payment, and invoice requirements. Connect:SM through it's n-tier account hierarchy structure enables companies to satisfy these requirements.
Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)
Customer proprietary network information (CPNI) is the data collected by telecommunications companies about a consumer's telephone calls. It includes the time, date, duration and destination number of each call, the type of network a consumer subscribes to, and any other information that appears on the consumer's telephone bill.
Telemarketers working on behalf of telephone companies, attempting to either win back a customer or upsell a customer with more services, must ask the customer's consent before accessing the billing information or before using that information to offer an upsell or any change of services. Usually this is done at the beginning of a call from the telemarketer to the telephone subscriber.
Credit Authorization
In a post-paid billing environment, companies may require a check check on their customers before extending credit on a subscription plan of some duration that involves a minimum time commitment, high unit value, and/or the risk that a customer could run up expensive usage charges and skip out on the invoice. Connect:SM enables customers to interface in real-time with external credit authorization services during the order entry process.
Credit Decisioning (Policy)
Credit decisioning or credit policy involve guidelines that spell out how to decide which customers are sold on open account, the exact payment terms, the limits set on outstanding balances and how to deal with delinquent accounts. Though many consumers expect to pay cash or use a credit card when making a purchase, commercial customers typically want to be billed for any products and services they buy requiring the seller to decide how much credit they are willing to extend and under what circumstances. There's no one-size-fits-all credit policy--the policy should be based on the seller's particular business and cash-flow circumstances, industry standards, current economic conditions, and the degree of risk involved.
When creating a policy or deciding on credit, consider the link between credit and sales. Easy credit terms can be an excellent way to boost sales, but they can also increase losses if customers default. A typical credit policy will address credit limits, credit terms, deposits, accepting credit cards, ACH, or personal checks, customer information, and order related documentation. An often-overlooked element in setting a credit policy is the design of invoices and statements. The invoice is the document that describes what the customer is being billed for, while the statement is the follow-up document that indicates the status of the account. One collection and creditor rights expert says that invoices and statements that are clear, easy to read, and allow the customer to quickly identify what is being billed are likely to be paid faster.
Cross Sell
Cross-selling means selling an additional product or service to an existing customer. In practice cross-selling can be defined in many different ways. Elements that might influence the definition include: the size of the business, the industry sector it operates within and the financial motivations. The objectives of cross-selling can be either to increase the revenue derived from a client or to protect the relationship with a client. Unlike acquiring new business, cross-selling involves an element of risk that existing relationships with a client could be disrupted. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the additional product or service being sold to the client(s) enhances the value the client get from the company.
Customer Service Representative (CSR)
The Call Center customer touch-point involves inbound and outbound Customer Service Representatives handling new orders, change orders, and customer support issues. It is important that these resources have all the information on customers, orders, and support issues readily available and easily accessible in order to deliver excellent customer service. Connect:SM delivers a 360º view of all customer and business activity throughout the customer life-cycle so that CSRs can handle any situation easily and efficiently. Connect:SM's memo capability enables CSRs to record essential information from a customer interaction, trigger actions, and provide a automated tickler capability to ensure proper follow up on open items.
Customer Life-cycle
A Customer Interaction is any experience the customer has with a company during any stage of their life-cycle (order-to-cash). This can be across any customer touch-point such as a web store, call center, reseller, or in store. It can involve any step in the customer life-cycle. A bad customer interaction can damage the individual relationship or worst lead to bad references and word of mouth, while a good interaction maintains the relationship, often leads to additional revenue, and creates positive references and word of mouth. Having 360º view of all customer and business activity at all customer touch-points and each stage of the customer life-cycle are essential first steps to ensure positive customer interactions.
Customer Intimacy
At BillWise, customer intimacy is a core value. A company's relationship with their billing vendor is critical from an "order-to-cash" process perspective, and can be highly strategic from a customer life-cycle perspective. Because these factors and the level of integration with other internal and external applications and services that evolve over time, billing relationships tend to be viewed as long-term. BillWise believes strongly in the need for your billing vendor to be a trusted partner in your long term success and have demonstrated this through customer relationships that have spanned over 20 years. Businesses evolve, markets shift, and technology change, through it all your billing system should scale, adapt, and provide the competitive advantage you require, and your vendor should provide the business relationship that supports your success.
Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)
Customer Premise Equipment is physical equipment deployed at a customer location. Traditionally, this term implied telecommunications equipment such as in-home wiring, terminators, phone sets, etc., cable TV set-top boxes. Today, because of the internet the definition of CPE is expanding to encompass any and all forms of connected devices found at a customer location such as game boxes, appliances, medical devices, and others. Additionally, with the advent of Cloud Computing, you have the reverse of CPE in cloud resources such as remote storage.
Cycle Billing
Cycle Billing enables sending invoices to customers systematically throughout the month rather than billing all customers on the same day each month, thus spreading work evenly over time. Connect:SM supports up to 28 cycles and allows you to assign which cycle you want a specific customer to use. Additionally, support is provided for synchronized charging to the beginning of a cycle period with proper pro-ration for interim usage, and/or partial period charges.
A chargeback occurs when a buyer asks their credit card company to remove a charge from their credit card statement. The credit card company will ask the buyer to provide an explanation about why they are disputing the charge. Two common reasons for chargebacks are - the buyer's credit card number is stolen and used fraudulently, and the buyer makes a purchase, but believes that the seller failed to fulfill their side of the agreement. Certain laws and credit card issuer policies usually allow buyers to file chargebacks weeks or sometimes months after the initial transaction occurs which creates complication for the merchant. Connect:SM automates the credit card process and provides rules driven options for handling credit card exceptions such as chargebacks. This enables the merchant to intelligently manage large volumes of credit card transactions and stay on top of potential chargeback problems in an efficient and cost effective manner.
Change Order
A Change Order represents any subsequent order to the initial sales order for an individual account. The Change Order may involve a new service order, a work order, a trouble ticket, or an upgrade or downgrade in subscription plan.
Churn
A measure of customer attrition, calculated as the number of customers who discontinue service during a specified time period, divided by the total number of customers at the start of that period. Churn is an operational metric used to gauge the overall health of a subscription business. Churn is measured in units or dollars. For companies that offer multiple services or products, Churn may be measured at the customer level or at the product or service level so that the business can get insight into whether customers are churning to other service providers, as well as whether customers are churning on certain services or products. Once a Churn trend is identified the business should seek to analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to investigate the underlying cause for the Churn such as a competitive pricing threat, customer service issue, quality issue, etc.
Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC)
In the United States, a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) is a telephone company that competes with the already established local telephone business by providing its own network and switching. The term distinguishes new or potential competitors from established local exchange carriers (LECs) and arises from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was intended to promote competition among both long-distance and local phone service providers. Besides pure CLECs competing locally or regionally with Verizon and AT&T, many Cable MSOs have been CLECs as part of their offering digital phone service to their customers. Issues such as carrier access billing (CABS), and others are important to CLECs and often are areas of concern for revenue leakage. Connect:SM for Communications helps carriers reconcile and settle their inter-carrier charges, as well as provides the reporting insight needed to spot issues before they become big problems.
Cloud Commerce
Cloud Commerce refers to conducting revenue generating business through the Cloud. Profit-minded companies that have SaaS offerings that run in the Cloud are examples of businesses conducting Cloud Commerce. The web designers and developers that build these SaaS applications are commonly referred to as "cloud developers". The Cloud Commerce revenue model generally is based on using subscription plans, one-time charges, and in some cases, usage charges. See Cloud Computing for additional information.
Cloud Computing
Typical cloud computing services provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser or through APIs, while the software and data are stored on the servers. These services include - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoid capital expenditures by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offerings employ the utility computing model, which is similar to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, whereas others bill on a subscription basis.
Communications Service Provider (CSP)
A Communications Service Provider (CSP) is a company in the telecom (landline and wireless), Internet, cable, satellite, or managed services business that transports information electronically over one or more types of networks (voice, data, or video). Communication service provider often specialize in certain industries, such as telecommunications, entertainment and media, and Internet/Web services. Many communication service providers, such as cable companies, FTTH providers, CLECs, and RBOCS have branched into multiple communications services including voice, broadband, and broadcast television. Each type of communications service has its own technical infrastructure that historically has required CSPs to use multiple communications billing systems to handle the unique provisioning and billing requirements of the service. Modern communications billing systems, like Connect:SM for Communications, are convergent service billing solutions that handle all types of services through one billing solution.
Competitive Differentiation
Competitive differentiation occurs when a firm somehow differentiates its product or service from that of competitors. Competitive differentiation may be an actual difference, such as a longer warranty or a lower price, or a perceived difference generated through things such as advertising and marketing promotions. A familiar example was the Sprint Family Plan which was enabled by the flexibility of Sprint's billing system to provide packaging, pricing, and order management for unique offer that AT&T could not match because of the rigidity of their billing system. Connect:SM provides the flexibility across it's functionality to enable customers to create competitive differentiation for their businesses.
Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce
BillWise's Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce is a leading Subscription Billing and Recurring Payments solutions. The integrated, end-to-end system provides functionality to manage customers, orders, products, inventory, billing, payments, as well as support marketing and provide integration to other critical business applications. Different editions are available to address the varying degrees of complexity and scale represented by the diverse businesses of our customers. They are Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise. It is available as a SaaS offering with optional managed services.
Connect:SM Private Label
Connect:SM Private Label Billing refers to BillWise's reseller program. Under the program, 3rd party developers and application providers can private label Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce or Connect:SM for Communications under their brand name and resell subscription billing and recurring payment processing services to their customers. The program generally takes one of two forms. The first is the more traditional VAR model where Connect:SM is sold along side the reseller's existing application as an integrated extension. The second form, is creating a new business application on top of the Connect:SM platform and taking that into a particular market. Both approaches are excellent ways for entrepreneurs to add value to their existing business, open new markets, and extend their reach within growing vertical markets. Refer to the Private Label Billing web pages for more details and examples.
Connect:SM for Communications
BillWise's Connect:SM for Communications provides convergent communications service billing capabilities for small and mid-market communications service providers such as Cable MSOs. Built on the Connect:SM platform, it includes those capabilities unique to communications service providers delivering voice, broadband, wireless, and/or video services to their customers. Different editions are available to address the varying degrees of complexity and scale. It is available as a SaaS offering, managed service offering, or in traditional license form.
Connect4Billing
Connect4Billing is the name of BillWise's blog site and Connect4Billing.com is BillWise's customer website for accessing Connect:SM and interacting with BillWise for customer support.
Consumption Pricing
Pricing a service or item based on actual consumption of a given product or service, rather than a flat rate for a given service or period of time. Connect:SM supports any unit of measurement for pricing. Examples of when usage-based pricing is used include, cloud computing, data center services for bandwidth, streaming video, content consumption, broadband data usage, wired and wireless telephony, VoIP, conference services, SMS, WiFi/WiMax internet access, electricity usage, water usage, gaming, machine time usage, and many other applications. Connect:SM supports both file-based usage records and streaming usage. Usage can be processed real-time or in batch mode. Certain applications may require BillWise's advanced multi-service real-time, rules-based rating engine.
Corporate Accounts
Corporations often involve special contract and invoicing requirements. Multiple levels of hierarchy such as departments, locations, subsidiaries, and the like might impose special product availability, pricing, order authorization, billing, payment, and invoice requirements. Connect:SM through it's n-tier account hierarchy structure enables companies to satisfy these requirements.
Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)
Customer proprietary network information (CPNI) is the data collected by telecommunications companies about a consumer's telephone calls. It includes the time, date, duration and destination number of each call, the type of network a consumer subscribes to, and any other information that appears on the consumer's telephone bill.
Telemarketers working on behalf of telephone companies, attempting to either win back a customer or upsell a customer with more services, must ask the customer's consent before accessing the billing information or before using that information to offer an upsell or any change of services. Usually this is done at the beginning of a call from the telemarketer to the telephone subscriber.
Credit Authorization
In a post-paid billing environment, companies may require a check check on their customers before extending credit on a subscription plan of some duration that involves a minimum time commitment, high unit value, and/or the risk that a customer could run up expensive usage charges and skip out on the invoice. Connect:SM enables customers to interface in real-time with external credit authorization services during the order entry process.
Credit Decisioning (Policy)
Credit decisioning or credit policy involve guidelines that spell out how to decide which customers are sold on open account, the exact payment terms, the limits set on outstanding balances and how to deal with delinquent accounts. Though many consumers expect to pay cash or use a credit card when making a purchase, commercial customers typically want to be billed for any products and services they buy requiring the seller to decide how much credit they are willing to extend and under what circumstances. There's no one-size-fits-all credit policy--the policy should be based on the seller's particular business and cash-flow circumstances, industry standards, current economic conditions, and the degree of risk involved.
When creating a policy or deciding on credit, consider the link between credit and sales. Easy credit terms can be an excellent way to boost sales, but they can also increase losses if customers default. A typical credit policy will address credit limits, credit terms, deposits, accepting credit cards, ACH, or personal checks, customer information, and order related documentation. An often-overlooked element in setting a credit policy is the design of invoices and statements. The invoice is the document that describes what the customer is being billed for, while the statement is the follow-up document that indicates the status of the account. One collection and creditor rights expert says that invoices and statements that are clear, easy to read, and allow the customer to quickly identify what is being billed are likely to be paid faster.
Cross Sell
Cross-selling means selling an additional product or service to an existing customer. In practice cross-selling can be defined in many different ways. Elements that might influence the definition include: the size of the business, the industry sector it operates within and the financial motivations. The objectives of cross-selling can be either to increase the revenue derived from a client or to protect the relationship with a client. Unlike acquiring new business, cross-selling involves an element of risk that existing relationships with a client could be disrupted. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the additional product or service being sold to the client(s) enhances the value the client get from the company.
Customer Service Representative (CSR)
The Call Center customer touch-point involves inbound and outbound Customer Service Representatives handling new orders, change orders, and customer support issues. It is important that these resources have all the information on customers, orders, and support issues readily available and easily accessible in order to deliver excellent customer service. Connect:SM delivers a 360º view of all customer and business activity throughout the customer life-cycle so that CSRs can handle any situation easily and efficiently. Connect:SM's memo capability enables CSRs to record essential information from a customer interaction, trigger actions, and provide a automated tickler capability to ensure proper follow up on open items.
Customer Life-cycle
A Customer Interaction is any experience the customer has with a company during any stage of their life-cycle (order-to-cash). This can be across any customer touch-point such as a web store, call center, reseller, or in store. It can involve any step in the customer life-cycle. A bad customer interaction can damage the individual relationship or worst lead to bad references and word of mouth, while a good interaction maintains the relationship, often leads to additional revenue, and creates positive references and word of mouth. Having 360º view of all customer and business activity at all customer touch-points and each stage of the customer life-cycle are essential first steps to ensure positive customer interactions.
Customer Intimacy
At BillWise, customer intimacy is a core value. A company's relationship with their billing vendor is critical from an "order-to-cash" process perspective, and can be highly strategic from a customer life-cycle perspective. Because these factors and the level of integration with other internal and external applications and services that evolve over time, billing relationships tend to be viewed as long-term. BillWise believes strongly in the need for your billing vendor to be a trusted partner in your long term success and have demonstrated this through customer relationships that have spanned over 20 years. Businesses evolve, markets shift, and technology change, through it all your billing system should scale, adapt, and provide the competitive advantage you require, and your vendor should provide the business relationship that supports your success.
Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)
Customer Premise Equipment is physical equipment deployed at a customer location. Traditionally, this term implied telecommunications equipment such as in-home wiring, terminators, phone sets, etc., cable TV set-top boxes. Today, because of the internet the definition of CPE is expanding to encompass any and all forms of connected devices found at a customer location such as game boxes, appliances, medical devices, and others. Additionally, with the advent of Cloud Computing, you have the reverse of CPE in cloud resources such as remote storage.
Cycle Billing
Cycle Billing enables sending invoices to customers systematically throughout the month rather than billing all customers on the same day each month, thus spreading work evenly over time. Connect:SM supports up to 28 cycles and allows you to assign which cycle you want a specific customer to use. Additionally, support is provided for synchronized charging to the beginning of a cycle period with proper pro-ration for interim usage, and/or partial period charges.
Dashboard
A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance. Often used in business intelligence, a dashboard provides all the critical information needed to make strategic decisions, run the daily operations of a team, or perform tasks. Common attributes include high level summaries with drill-down capabilities to source data, tailoring options, metrics or KPIs, real-time information, concise and intuitive presentation. Used in conjunction with a data repository that stores transactional data, dashboards and reports are common methods for viewing and analyzing large amounts of transaction related data to identify trends and exceptions or to monitor performance. Refer to Connect:SM for Communications for more information on it's data repository and dashboard capabilities.
Developer's Sandbox
A Developer's Sandbox is a separate technical environment where customers or prospects can test software or services with a subset of data without disruption to their production environment.
Downgrade
A downgrade is a change order to an existing contract or subscription where a customer chooses a lower service level. This can be a less expensive service offering, or a smaller quantity (users, usage-level, etc.). Depending on business rules, this change may result in a prorated credit of the original service and/or a penalty fee associated with the change.
Dunning Process
Dunning is the process of communicating with customers to ensure the collection of accounts receivable. Communications progress from gentle reminders to stern letters as accounts become more past due. Connect:SM provides a configurable, rules-driven dunning process. User controlled workflow and communications templates enable companies to tailor the steps involved, the timing between communications, and how services are impacted.
A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance. Often used in business intelligence, a dashboard provides all the critical information needed to make strategic decisions, run the daily operations of a team, or perform tasks. Common attributes include high level summaries with drill-down capabilities to source data, tailoring options, metrics or KPIs, real-time information, concise and intuitive presentation. Used in conjunction with a data repository that stores transactional data, dashboards and reports are common methods for viewing and analyzing large amounts of transaction related data to identify trends and exceptions or to monitor performance. Refer to Connect:SM for Communications for more information on it's data repository and dashboard capabilities.
Developer's Sandbox
A Developer's Sandbox is a separate technical environment where customers or prospects can test software or services with a subset of data without disruption to their production environment.
Downgrade
A downgrade is a change order to an existing contract or subscription where a customer chooses a lower service level. This can be a less expensive service offering, or a smaller quantity (users, usage-level, etc.). Depending on business rules, this change may result in a prorated credit of the original service and/or a penalty fee associated with the change.
Dunning Process
Dunning is the process of communicating with customers to ensure the collection of accounts receivable. Communications progress from gentle reminders to stern letters as accounts become more past due. Connect:SM provides a configurable, rules-driven dunning process. User controlled workflow and communications templates enable companies to tailor the steps involved, the timing between communications, and how services are impacted.
e-Commerce
Electronic commerce, or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet. A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as SaaS offerings, but often electronic commerce also involves the transportation of physical items in some way.
Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBP&P)
Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBP&P) is the electronic presentation of statements, bills, invoices, and related information sent by a company to its customers, and corresponding payment for goods or services.
Electronic Payment
Any non-paper based form of payment; e.g. ACH, wire transfer, credit or debit card, PayPal.
Emerging Communications
The lines between traditional telecommunications, internet communications, mobile communications, and media and entertainment are blurring and changing the game for traditional service providers as well as creating innovative offerings from new market entrants. Voice, data, and video as communications modes are at the intersection of communications on the web involving community, entertainment and e-commerce. Voice 2.0 is a leader in emerging communications by democratizing telecommunications services as embodied in innovative software applications that use voice technology to solve business problems rather than just replicate plain old telephony services. Unified communications is an example of the merging of several technologies to enable collaboration. Video of IP is emerging to challenge the traditional model for how broadcast television and movies are watched and consumed. In an all IP network world, voice, data, and video are just bits and traditional distribution barriers are challenged.
Electronic commerce, or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet. A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as SaaS offerings, but often electronic commerce also involves the transportation of physical items in some way.
Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBP&P)
Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBP&P) is the electronic presentation of statements, bills, invoices, and related information sent by a company to its customers, and corresponding payment for goods or services.
Electronic Payment
Any non-paper based form of payment; e.g. ACH, wire transfer, credit or debit card, PayPal.
Emerging Communications
The lines between traditional telecommunications, internet communications, mobile communications, and media and entertainment are blurring and changing the game for traditional service providers as well as creating innovative offerings from new market entrants. Voice, data, and video as communications modes are at the intersection of communications on the web involving community, entertainment and e-commerce. Voice 2.0 is a leader in emerging communications by democratizing telecommunications services as embodied in innovative software applications that use voice technology to solve business problems rather than just replicate plain old telephony services. Unified communications is an example of the merging of several technologies to enable collaboration. Video of IP is emerging to challenge the traditional model for how broadcast television and movies are watched and consumed. In an all IP network world, voice, data, and video are just bits and traditional distribution barriers are challenged.
Family Plans
Family plans involve providing a parent/child relationship between individual accounts and enabling product pricing, usage, and billing parameters to be managed at the parent level, child level, or at a combination of the two. For example, volume discounts or rollover features might be extended across all family members that have separate CPE devices.
Fixed Broadband
High-speed data transmission to homes and businesses using technologies such as T1, cable, FTTH, DSL and FiOS. This excludes mobile broadband which enables broadband services wirelessly either within a carrier's market footprint or across carrier networks (roaming). Various network standards may be used such as WiMax/WiFi and HSPA+. Charging models include flat rate, tiered, and usage based.
Family plans involve providing a parent/child relationship between individual accounts and enabling product pricing, usage, and billing parameters to be managed at the parent level, child level, or at a combination of the two. For example, volume discounts or rollover features might be extended across all family members that have separate CPE devices.
Fixed Broadband
High-speed data transmission to homes and businesses using technologies such as T1, cable, FTTH, DSL and FiOS. This excludes mobile broadband which enables broadband services wirelessly either within a carrier's market footprint or across carrier networks (roaming). Various network standards may be used such as WiMax/WiFi and HSPA+. Charging models include flat rate, tiered, and usage based.
General Ledger
The general ledger is a book of final entry summarizing all of a company's financial transactions, through offsetting debit and credit accounts. A Chart of Accounts is a list of all account names and numbers used by the general ledger. The general ledger is fed transactions by other modules such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, etc. and the transaction detail is maintained in these other modules. Connect:SM integrates with the leading general ledger packages to provide financial transaction detail relating to billing and payment operations.
The general ledger is a book of final entry summarizing all of a company's financial transactions, through offsetting debit and credit accounts. A Chart of Accounts is a list of all account names and numbers used by the general ledger. The general ledger is fed transactions by other modules such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, etc. and the transaction detail is maintained in these other modules. Connect:SM integrates with the leading general ledger packages to provide financial transaction detail relating to billing and payment operations.
Help Desk
A Help Desk is a service a company offers to assist customers with issues related to the company's products and services. Help desk requests can be initiated via an inbound call to a call center or online via a support website. Connect:SM enables customers to assist customers by making all customer information readily available to customer service representatives or on websites via our web services API. Additionally, the optional Trouble Ticketing module can be used to handle service/repair orders, access the knowledge base, or establish a field service request.
Hosted Billing
Hosted Billing services have been around a long time. Historically, these services were delivered via mainframe data centers that housed dedicated customer environments. Today, SaaS and Cloud Computing represent the latest trend in hosted services such as billing. BillWise provides both SaaS billing solutions and single-tenant, managed service billing solutions that are hosted at a customer's data center or their colocation facility of choice.
HSPA+
Evolved High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+) provides mobile broadband and allows consumers and business users to rely on HSPA+ as their main broadband connection, and offer a similar user experience across mobile and fixed networks. HSPA+’s high-capacity broadband uplink and downlink with integrated QoS and low latency can support the entire range of IP services, including delay-sensitive applications such as VoIP and low latency gaming. HSPA+ further enhances the user’s experience and makes these services more affordable by lowering costs through increased capacity. Examples of IP-based services enabled via HSPA+ include streaming video and music, telco-quality VoIP, low-latency gaming, push-to-talk, multimedia upload and exchange, high speed web browsing, video telephony, service tiering, multicasting, and others.
A Help Desk is a service a company offers to assist customers with issues related to the company's products and services. Help desk requests can be initiated via an inbound call to a call center or online via a support website. Connect:SM enables customers to assist customers by making all customer information readily available to customer service representatives or on websites via our web services API. Additionally, the optional Trouble Ticketing module can be used to handle service/repair orders, access the knowledge base, or establish a field service request.
Hosted Billing
Hosted Billing services have been around a long time. Historically, these services were delivered via mainframe data centers that housed dedicated customer environments. Today, SaaS and Cloud Computing represent the latest trend in hosted services such as billing. BillWise provides both SaaS billing solutions and single-tenant, managed service billing solutions that are hosted at a customer's data center or their colocation facility of choice.
HSPA+
Evolved High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+) provides mobile broadband and allows consumers and business users to rely on HSPA+ as their main broadband connection, and offer a similar user experience across mobile and fixed networks. HSPA+’s high-capacity broadband uplink and downlink with integrated QoS and low latency can support the entire range of IP services, including delay-sensitive applications such as VoIP and low latency gaming. HSPA+ further enhances the user’s experience and makes these services more affordable by lowering costs through increased capacity. Examples of IP-based services enabled via HSPA+ include streaming video and music, telco-quality VoIP, low-latency gaming, push-to-talk, multimedia upload and exchange, high speed web browsing, video telephony, service tiering, multicasting, and others.
Integrated View
Integrated View refers to the ability to see a holistic view of your business and customer information. Obtaining this integrated view is challenging when the needed data resides on multiple systems and in different formats. An end-to-end, integrated solution like Connect:SM makes it easy to get an integrated view of your business and customer information because it all resides in the Connect:SM Platform. For subscription businesses and other recurring revenue businesses this is critical to successfully managing the customer life-cycle and maximizing revenues. Additionally, with subscription and recurring revenue businesses having an integrated view across all payment methods is critical to effectively managing the "bill-to-cash" cycle.
IPTV
(Internet Protocol Television), IPTV delivers scheduled TV programs and video-on-demand (VOD) via the IP protocol and digital streaming techniques used to watch video on the Internet. In order to receive and decode the images in realtime, the user requires either an IPTV set-top box or a computer and software-based media player. IPTV enables a data-voice-video "triple play" service to be based entirely on IP because Internet access, voice over IP (VoIP) and IPTV all use the same IP packet format.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Interactive Voice Response capabilities have been around a long time and used for a variety of business purposes such as navigating a business' 800 number menu options for customer support or sales information. With the advent of IP Telephony and Voice over IP (VoIP), IVR applications have become much easier to develop and deploy. Many open source versions exist and a number of excellent SaaS-based services have come onto the market for developers to choose from for creating innovative new IVR applications.
Invoice for Convergent Services
Producing a single invoice for multiple divergent services can be complicated and many billing and invoicing systems do not adequately support the required capabilities. Invoices should be able to include summary and/or usage detail along with associated taxes and fees for each service, and provide configuration options for how each service section is laid out, what marketing/business messaging needs to be include for each service, etc. In today's online world, this also extends to what invoice information your customers can view online. Connect:SM not only supports providing online pdf versions of invoices, but also provides the ability to view unbilled and billed usage details at customer configurable levels of summarization with drill down capabilities to individual records.
Integrated View refers to the ability to see a holistic view of your business and customer information. Obtaining this integrated view is challenging when the needed data resides on multiple systems and in different formats. An end-to-end, integrated solution like Connect:SM makes it easy to get an integrated view of your business and customer information because it all resides in the Connect:SM Platform. For subscription businesses and other recurring revenue businesses this is critical to successfully managing the customer life-cycle and maximizing revenues. Additionally, with subscription and recurring revenue businesses having an integrated view across all payment methods is critical to effectively managing the "bill-to-cash" cycle.
IPTV
(Internet Protocol Television), IPTV delivers scheduled TV programs and video-on-demand (VOD) via the IP protocol and digital streaming techniques used to watch video on the Internet. In order to receive and decode the images in realtime, the user requires either an IPTV set-top box or a computer and software-based media player. IPTV enables a data-voice-video "triple play" service to be based entirely on IP because Internet access, voice over IP (VoIP) and IPTV all use the same IP packet format.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Interactive Voice Response capabilities have been around a long time and used for a variety of business purposes such as navigating a business' 800 number menu options for customer support or sales information. With the advent of IP Telephony and Voice over IP (VoIP), IVR applications have become much easier to develop and deploy. Many open source versions exist and a number of excellent SaaS-based services have come onto the market for developers to choose from for creating innovative new IVR applications.
Invoice for Convergent Services
Producing a single invoice for multiple divergent services can be complicated and many billing and invoicing systems do not adequately support the required capabilities. Invoices should be able to include summary and/or usage detail along with associated taxes and fees for each service, and provide configuration options for how each service section is laid out, what marketing/business messaging needs to be include for each service, etc. In today's online world, this also extends to what invoice information your customers can view online. Connect:SM not only supports providing online pdf versions of invoices, but also provides the ability to view unbilled and billed usage details at customer configurable levels of summarization with drill down capabilities to individual records.
Lending Software-as-a-Service
Providing lending services in a self service online mode is becoming increasingly popular across a range of lending products. Many of the major lending institutions have built online origination applications to automate and self serve the application and approval process. With Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce, lenders can integrate their online origination application with Connect:SM to provide a seamless automated link between origination and loan servicing enabling lenders to take cost out of the process and increase customer satisfaction by faster loan decisions and on-boarding.
Lockbox
An accounts-receivable collection option where customers mail payments to a post office box affiliated with the company’s bank. Bank employees check the box frequently, deposit checks into the company’s checking account, and then electronically transmit the check details to the company’s accounts receivable department. The process gives the company access to its money more quickly and saves the company from hiring more staff to process the checks.
Providing lending services in a self service online mode is becoming increasingly popular across a range of lending products. Many of the major lending institutions have built online origination applications to automate and self serve the application and approval process. With Connect:SM for Cloud Commerce, lenders can integrate their online origination application with Connect:SM to provide a seamless automated link between origination and loan servicing enabling lenders to take cost out of the process and increase customer satisfaction by faster loan decisions and on-boarding.
Lockbox
An accounts-receivable collection option where customers mail payments to a post office box affiliated with the company’s bank. Bank employees check the box frequently, deposit checks into the company’s checking account, and then electronically transmit the check details to the company’s accounts receivable department. The process gives the company access to its money more quickly and saves the company from hiring more staff to process the checks.
Managed Services
Managed Services involve managing all aspects of the application and associated hardware to maximize availability and performance. All components of the solution are monitored for availability and performance and exceptions are immediately addressed by expert staff. BillWise provides a suite of managed services for Connect:SM designed to outsource these types of activities so the customer doesn't have to maintain specially-trained full-time resources for this purpose.
Market Trial
Market Trials refer to the process of launching new products or services in limited availability to evaluate demand for the product or service and working out operational issues before doing a general release. The challenge for many marketing trials is the cost of adapting existing systems such as billing to support the trial. Connect:SM deployed as a service is an ideal solution for market trials because it provides an end-to-end, customer life-cycle billing solution without costly licensing, long term contractual commitment, infrastructure, or IT involvement. This accelerates time-to-market while controlling costs.
Marketing Sandbox
A Marketing Sandbox enables product managers and other marketing staff to simulate and test changes to existing price plans and new price plans against datasets of existing customers. Connect:SM enables you to generate an unlimited number of Marketing Sandboxes for simulating the impact that a new or changed price plan would have compared to an existing price plan when applied to a dataset of existing customers.
Merchant Account
A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept payments by ACH, debit or credit cards. A merchant account also serves as an agreement between a merchant, a merchant bank and payment processor for the settlement of ACH, credit card and/or debit card transactions.
Metered Bandwidth
Bandwidth metering is a service model in which a broadband provider such as a cable company or ISP tracks bandwidth use and charges high traffic customers accordingly. Typically, a customer will select a service package with a flat rate up to a specified limit and will then pay additional fees beyond that limit, probably per gigabyte of data downloaded.
Micro Transaction
Micro Transactions are financial transactions involving very small sums of money which traditionally have been impractical because transaction costs associated with payment were too high even if the transaction fee was just a few cents. Connect:SM solved this problem through it's Balance Management capability which lets customers aggregate micro transactions on an account until the balance reaches a limit the justifies the associated transaction cost. Balance management can be implemented using a prepay model or authorized credit model.
Mobile Broadband
Mobile broadband describes various types of wireless high-speed internet access through a portable modem, telephone or other device. Examples include WiMax and HSPA+ networks.
Multi-Channel and Location Support
Multi-Channel and location support implies the ability for a single system to handle transaction activity across channels and for different locations with transaction handling and reporting segmented by channel and location. Business rules for billing and payments, order handling, pricing, and product availability may be tailored to individual channels and locations.
Multi Currency
Multi Currency can reference the ability to support multiple currencies as the native, or base, currency in an application, or it can refer to the ability to price and take payments in different currencies within an application. Connect:SM provides support for both types of multi-currency configurations.
Multi-Level Billing
Multi-level billing is when the billing system you use to bill your customers for your products and services is also used by your customers to bill their customers and so on. Reseller billing capabilities found in some of the most robust billing systems available on the market start to address this type of billing through account hierarchy functionality, but fall short because they often they lack true n-tier account hierarchy capabilities and even more importantly fail to extend the hierarchy structure across all modules of the billing system including reporting, processing, access and security, product management, pricing, and invoicing. Connect:SM offers true multi-level billing capabilities to support the most demanding hierarchy structures.
Managed Services involve managing all aspects of the application and associated hardware to maximize availability and performance. All components of the solution are monitored for availability and performance and exceptions are immediately addressed by expert staff. BillWise provides a suite of managed services for Connect:SM designed to outsource these types of activities so the customer doesn't have to maintain specially-trained full-time resources for this purpose.
Market Trial
Market Trials refer to the process of launching new products or services in limited availability to evaluate demand for the product or service and working out operational issues before doing a general release. The challenge for many marketing trials is the cost of adapting existing systems such as billing to support the trial. Connect:SM deployed as a service is an ideal solution for market trials because it provides an end-to-end, customer life-cycle billing solution without costly licensing, long term contractual commitment, infrastructure, or IT involvement. This accelerates time-to-market while controlling costs.
Marketing Sandbox
A Marketing Sandbox enables product managers and other marketing staff to simulate and test changes to existing price plans and new price plans against datasets of existing customers. Connect:SM enables you to generate an unlimited number of Marketing Sandboxes for simulating the impact that a new or changed price plan would have compared to an existing price plan when applied to a dataset of existing customers.
Merchant Account
A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept payments by ACH, debit or credit cards. A merchant account also serves as an agreement between a merchant, a merchant bank and payment processor for the settlement of ACH, credit card and/or debit card transactions.
Metered Bandwidth
Bandwidth metering is a service model in which a broadband provider such as a cable company or ISP tracks bandwidth use and charges high traffic customers accordingly. Typically, a customer will select a service package with a flat rate up to a specified limit and will then pay additional fees beyond that limit, probably per gigabyte of data downloaded.
Micro Transaction
Micro Transactions are financial transactions involving very small sums of money which traditionally have been impractical because transaction costs associated with payment were too high even if the transaction fee was just a few cents. Connect:SM solved this problem through it's Balance Management capability which lets customers aggregate micro transactions on an account until the balance reaches a limit the justifies the associated transaction cost. Balance management can be implemented using a prepay model or authorized credit model.
Mobile Broadband
Mobile broadband describes various types of wireless high-speed internet access through a portable modem, telephone or other device. Examples include WiMax and HSPA+ networks.
Multi-Channel and Location Support
Multi-Channel and location support implies the ability for a single system to handle transaction activity across channels and for different locations with transaction handling and reporting segmented by channel and location. Business rules for billing and payments, order handling, pricing, and product availability may be tailored to individual channels and locations.
Multi Currency
Multi Currency can reference the ability to support multiple currencies as the native, or base, currency in an application, or it can refer to the ability to price and take payments in different currencies within an application. Connect:SM provides support for both types of multi-currency configurations.
Multi-Level Billing
Multi-level billing is when the billing system you use to bill your customers for your products and services is also used by your customers to bill their customers and so on. Reseller billing capabilities found in some of the most robust billing systems available on the market start to address this type of billing through account hierarchy functionality, but fall short because they often they lack true n-tier account hierarchy capabilities and even more importantly fail to extend the hierarchy structure across all modules of the billing system including reporting, processing, access and security, product management, pricing, and invoicing. Connect:SM offers true multi-level billing capabilities to support the most demanding hierarchy structures.
Network Provisioning
Network provisioning refers to provisioning a customer's service(s) to the individual network elements involved so the customer can use the service. Network provisioning may involve multiple network elements in a single order and multiple types of services on a single network element or across elements.
Network provisioning refers to provisioning a customer's service(s) to the individual network elements involved so the customer can use the service. Network provisioning may involve multiple network elements in a single order and multiple types of services on a single network element or across elements.
Over the Top Video (OTT)
Over-the-top Video is a general term for service that is utilized over a network that is not offered by a broadband network operator. It's often referred to as "over-the-top" because these services ride on top of the broadband access service and doesn't require any business or technology affiliations with the broadband network operator.
Over-the-top Video is a general term for service that is utilized over a network that is not offered by a broadband network operator. It's often referred to as "over-the-top" because these services ride on top of the broadband access service and doesn't require any business or technology affiliations with the broadband network operator.
Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is an e-commerce application service provider service that authorizes payments for e-businesses, online retailers, or traditional brick and mortar retailers. It is the electronic counterpart to a physical point of sale terminal located in most retail outlets. Examples of payment gateways include PayPal, Authorize.net, CyberSource, Chase Paymentech, Teledraft, and Transcom Payment Services.
PCI Compliance
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. More information can be found at www.pcisecuritystandards.org
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
A comprehensive set of services that are delivered over the web including all systems and environments comprising the end-to-end life cycle of developing, testing, deploying and hosting web applications. E.g. Force.com, Google App Engine, Amazon EC2.
Point Solutions
Here’s a definition from PC Mag: “Solving one particular problem without regard to related issues. Point solutions are widely used to fix a problem or implement a new service quickly. “ Point solutions are sometimes used to build online commerce sites such as subscription businesses, but while the short term benefit might seem great the long term challenges are often ignored. Creating and maintaining an end-to-end, integrated view of your customer and business activity is challenging and often expensive to achieve using point solutions. For example, running a subscription business using a payment processor to handle subscription billing covers the recurring payment processing aspect but ignores the subscription management and customer life-cycle aspects of operating a successful subscription/recurring revenue business and limits access to and use of important payment details because they are stored in the payment processor's system not the subscription business' system.
Prepay
Prepay refers to the advance payment for goods or services. In consumption service environment, advance payment enables the customer to consume services up to a defined threshold before requiring the account to be topped off through a new prepaid transaction.
Print Services
Print Services refer to vendors that provide invoice printing and mailing services on an outsourced basis.
Private Label Billing
Private Label Billing refers to Connect:SM's capabilities being resold by a customer to their customers as a branded billing service run behind the scenes by BillWise as an outsourced service to the primary customer.
Promotions
Promotions are used by subscription companies to provide prospects with specialized pricing as an incentive to sign up. They are also used to track the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns.
A payment gateway is an e-commerce application service provider service that authorizes payments for e-businesses, online retailers, or traditional brick and mortar retailers. It is the electronic counterpart to a physical point of sale terminal located in most retail outlets. Examples of payment gateways include PayPal, Authorize.net, CyberSource, Chase Paymentech, Teledraft, and Transcom Payment Services.
PCI Compliance
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. More information can be found at www.pcisecuritystandards.org
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
A comprehensive set of services that are delivered over the web including all systems and environments comprising the end-to-end life cycle of developing, testing, deploying and hosting web applications. E.g. Force.com, Google App Engine, Amazon EC2.
Point Solutions
Here’s a definition from PC Mag: “Solving one particular problem without regard to related issues. Point solutions are widely used to fix a problem or implement a new service quickly. “ Point solutions are sometimes used to build online commerce sites such as subscription businesses, but while the short term benefit might seem great the long term challenges are often ignored. Creating and maintaining an end-to-end, integrated view of your customer and business activity is challenging and often expensive to achieve using point solutions. For example, running a subscription business using a payment processor to handle subscription billing covers the recurring payment processing aspect but ignores the subscription management and customer life-cycle aspects of operating a successful subscription/recurring revenue business and limits access to and use of important payment details because they are stored in the payment processor's system not the subscription business' system.
Prepay
Prepay refers to the advance payment for goods or services. In consumption service environment, advance payment enables the customer to consume services up to a defined threshold before requiring the account to be topped off through a new prepaid transaction.
Print Services
Print Services refer to vendors that provide invoice printing and mailing services on an outsourced basis.
Private Label Billing
Private Label Billing refers to Connect:SM's capabilities being resold by a customer to their customers as a branded billing service run behind the scenes by BillWise as an outsourced service to the primary customer.
Promotions
Promotions are used by subscription companies to provide prospects with specialized pricing as an incentive to sign up. They are also used to track the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns.
RADIUS
Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) is a networking protocol that provides centralized Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) management for computers to connect and use a network service. It serves three functions:
BillWise's convergent services billing mediation platform provides native RADIUS support.
Rating
Rating is the activity of determining the cost of a particular usage event. The rating process involves converting event-related data into a monetary-equivalent value. The rating process can be simple and straightforward or extremely complex requiring special configurable capabilities of the rating engine such as business rules, packaging, bundles, and discount and promotional pricing logic to name a few. Examples of complex rating include rating for a video download involving measuring the number of minutes, the amount of data, the quality of data transfer as identified by the service level agreement (SLA) and the usage cost of the video, or a subscriber who plays an on-line game may trade in-game currency or equipment or incentive tokens for discounted calls to other players of the game. Connect:SM, and its purpose-built high-volume, real-time complex event rating engine provides rating capabilities to meet the needs for simple to very complex real-time rating.
Recurring Billing
Recurring billing is billing that occurs at specified intervals over a period of time. Subscription plans and loan servicing are a good examples of recurring billing.
Revenue Leakage
Revenue Leakage often occurs when financial transactions traverse multiple systems in the "order-to-cash" process. Integration points are often sources of revenue leakage because of lack of auditability across systems, transaction timing differences between systems, and incomplete or duplicate records being passed between systems. Wholesale transaction are another source of revenue leakage because of the need to perform detailed reconciliation and settlement processes between the wholesale transaction supplier and the retail organization. Revenue leakage can be minimized through effective audit trails, exception handling, using an end-to-end integrated platform, and having automated reconciliation and settlement capabilities.
Revenue Recognition
Revenue Recognition is an accounting principle under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that determines the specific conditions under which income becomes realized as revenue. Generally, revenue is recognized only when a specific critical event has occurred and the amount of revenue is measurable.
Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) is a networking protocol that provides centralized Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) management for computers to connect and use a network service. It serves three functions:
- to authenticate users or devices before granting them access to a network,
- to authorize those users or devices for certain network services and
- to account for usage of those services.
BillWise's convergent services billing mediation platform provides native RADIUS support.
Rating
Rating is the activity of determining the cost of a particular usage event. The rating process involves converting event-related data into a monetary-equivalent value. The rating process can be simple and straightforward or extremely complex requiring special configurable capabilities of the rating engine such as business rules, packaging, bundles, and discount and promotional pricing logic to name a few. Examples of complex rating include rating for a video download involving measuring the number of minutes, the amount of data, the quality of data transfer as identified by the service level agreement (SLA) and the usage cost of the video, or a subscriber who plays an on-line game may trade in-game currency or equipment or incentive tokens for discounted calls to other players of the game. Connect:SM, and its purpose-built high-volume, real-time complex event rating engine provides rating capabilities to meet the needs for simple to very complex real-time rating.
Recurring Billing
Recurring billing is billing that occurs at specified intervals over a period of time. Subscription plans and loan servicing are a good examples of recurring billing.
Revenue Leakage
Revenue Leakage often occurs when financial transactions traverse multiple systems in the "order-to-cash" process. Integration points are often sources of revenue leakage because of lack of auditability across systems, transaction timing differences between systems, and incomplete or duplicate records being passed between systems. Wholesale transaction are another source of revenue leakage because of the need to perform detailed reconciliation and settlement processes between the wholesale transaction supplier and the retail organization. Revenue leakage can be minimized through effective audit trails, exception handling, using an end-to-end integrated platform, and having automated reconciliation and settlement capabilities.
Revenue Recognition
Revenue Recognition is an accounting principle under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that determines the specific conditions under which income becomes realized as revenue. Generally, revenue is recognized only when a specific critical event has occurred and the amount of revenue is measurable.
SAMIS
One of the most daunting tasks to any cable provider is to optimize the use of their scarcest resource: bandwidth. The difficulties in managing data capacity and throughput - bandwidth in the data world - are further compounded by the lack of tools to help identify who is using it, what it is being used for, when it is being used, and where the ongoing use is requiring us to spend our capex and opex resources. Additionally, enabling consumption-based pricing for bandwidth is a goal for residential and commercial applications. DOCSIS defines subscriber account management interface specification (SAMIS), as service definition designed to provide subscriber and service information. Applied in near real-time it enables identification of how bandwidth is used and provides the ability to use the IPDR records for billing purposes.
SAS 70
International regulatory standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants that requires formal reviews on an organization’s control over information technology and related processes.
Softswitch
A softswitch is a central device in a telecommunications network which connects calls from one phone line to another, entirely by means of software running on a computer system. This work was formerly carried out by hardware, with physical switchboards to route the calls. Examples of providers of softswitch products include Broadsoft, MetaSwitch, and Cisco.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet.
Subscriber
A subscriber is a customer of a subscription or recurring revenue business.
Subscription Business
A Subscription business is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by magazines & newspapers and subsequently by telecommunications and cable companies, but is now used by many businesses and websites. Rather than selling products individually, a subscription sells periodic use or access to a product or service, or, in the case of such non-profit organizations as opera companies or symphony orchestras, it sells tickets to the entire run of scheduled performances for an entire season. Subscriptions turn a one-time sale of a product into a recurring sale and can build brand loyalty. Industries that use this model include book clubs, record clubs, telephone companies, cable television providers, cell phone companies, internet providers, pay-TV channels, software providers, business solutions providers, financial services firms, fitness clubs, and pharmaceuticals, as well as the traditional newspapers and magazines. Renewal of a subscription may be periodic and activated automatically, so that the cost of a new period is automatically paid for by a pre-authorized charge to a credit card or a checking account.
Synchronized Billing
Synchronized Billing enables customers to register customers at any time and synchronize billing to an established billing date such as month-end or billing anniversary for situations where a client wants all subscriptions billed on the same anniversary date regardless of when purchased. Billing synchronization involves pro-rating charges to the desired billing date on both the front and back end of a subscription service.
One of the most daunting tasks to any cable provider is to optimize the use of their scarcest resource: bandwidth. The difficulties in managing data capacity and throughput - bandwidth in the data world - are further compounded by the lack of tools to help identify who is using it, what it is being used for, when it is being used, and where the ongoing use is requiring us to spend our capex and opex resources. Additionally, enabling consumption-based pricing for bandwidth is a goal for residential and commercial applications. DOCSIS defines subscriber account management interface specification (SAMIS), as service definition designed to provide subscriber and service information. Applied in near real-time it enables identification of how bandwidth is used and provides the ability to use the IPDR records for billing purposes.
SAS 70
International regulatory standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants that requires formal reviews on an organization’s control over information technology and related processes.
Softswitch
A softswitch is a central device in a telecommunications network which connects calls from one phone line to another, entirely by means of software running on a computer system. This work was formerly carried out by hardware, with physical switchboards to route the calls. Examples of providers of softswitch products include Broadsoft, MetaSwitch, and Cisco.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network, typically the Internet.
Subscriber
A subscriber is a customer of a subscription or recurring revenue business.
Subscription Business
A Subscription business is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by magazines & newspapers and subsequently by telecommunications and cable companies, but is now used by many businesses and websites. Rather than selling products individually, a subscription sells periodic use or access to a product or service, or, in the case of such non-profit organizations as opera companies or symphony orchestras, it sells tickets to the entire run of scheduled performances for an entire season. Subscriptions turn a one-time sale of a product into a recurring sale and can build brand loyalty. Industries that use this model include book clubs, record clubs, telephone companies, cable television providers, cell phone companies, internet providers, pay-TV channels, software providers, business solutions providers, financial services firms, fitness clubs, and pharmaceuticals, as well as the traditional newspapers and magazines. Renewal of a subscription may be periodic and activated automatically, so that the cost of a new period is automatically paid for by a pre-authorized charge to a credit card or a checking account.
Synchronized Billing
Synchronized Billing enables customers to register customers at any time and synchronize billing to an established billing date such as month-end or billing anniversary for situations where a client wants all subscriptions billed on the same anniversary date regardless of when purchased. Billing synchronization involves pro-rating charges to the desired billing date on both the front and back end of a subscription service.
Telecom Billing
Telecom billing is the process of gathering and grouping telecommunication service or product usage information for specific accounts or customers, producing and sending invoices, and recording payments made to customer accounts. BillWise's Connect:SM for Communications is an Industry Specific Version of BillWise’s Connect:SM Billing Platform that incorporates capabilities that are specific to Telecom billing and communication service providers delivering voice, broadband, wireless, and/or video services to their customers. These include real-time convergent mediation and rating, service provisioning, equipment inventory, settlement services, communications taxation, and many other capabilities.
Tiered Pricing
A subscription charge model where pricing changes are based on the incremental number of units that are purchased.
Telecom billing is the process of gathering and grouping telecommunication service or product usage information for specific accounts or customers, producing and sending invoices, and recording payments made to customer accounts. BillWise's Connect:SM for Communications is an Industry Specific Version of BillWise’s Connect:SM Billing Platform that incorporates capabilities that are specific to Telecom billing and communication service providers delivering voice, broadband, wireless, and/or video services to their customers. These include real-time convergent mediation and rating, service provisioning, equipment inventory, settlement services, communications taxation, and many other capabilities.
Tiered Pricing
A subscription charge model where pricing changes are based on the incremental number of units that are purchased.
Upgrade
A change order to an existing contract subscription where a customer chooses a higher service level. This can be a more expensive service offering, or a larger quantity.
Upgrade Path
An Upgrade Path refers to ensuring that a customer has a way to upgrade or migrate from one version or edition of a software application to another. This prevents software obsolesce and costly conversions to new software. Connect:SM ensures a smooth and orderly upgrade path and compatibility between the Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise Editions.
Usage Processing, Billing, and Presentment
Multi Currency can reference the ability to support multiple currencies as the native, or base, currency in an application, or it can refer to the ability to price and take payments in different currencies within an application. Connect:SM provides support for both types of multi-currency configurations.
A change order to an existing contract subscription where a customer chooses a higher service level. This can be a more expensive service offering, or a larger quantity.
Upgrade Path
An Upgrade Path refers to ensuring that a customer has a way to upgrade or migrate from one version or edition of a software application to another. This prevents software obsolesce and costly conversions to new software. Connect:SM ensures a smooth and orderly upgrade path and compatibility between the Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise Editions.
Usage Processing, Billing, and Presentment
Multi Currency can reference the ability to support multiple currencies as the native, or base, currency in an application, or it can refer to the ability to price and take payments in different currencies within an application. Connect:SM provides support for both types of multi-currency configurations.
Variable Pricing
Variable pricing refers to situations where the pricing for a specific product or service varies depending on characteristics of the sale such as geographic location, customer affiliation to an affinity group, or the presence of a seasonal discount.
Virtual Goods
Virtual goods are non-physical objects that are purchased for use in online communities or online games. Virtual goods may be services instead of goods. Sales of virtual goods are sometimes referred to as micro transactions. Virtual goods may be sold by companies that operate social networks, community sites or online games.
Voice 2.0
Voice 2.0 is used to describe the trends, technologies and applications used to bring IP telephony to the Web to create a new class of voice-enabled applications. Applications such as Skype, Phonetag, Voxeo, Tellme, SpinVox, Ribbit, IntellePeer, and Broadsoft Extend are examples of Voice 2.0 solutions and services.
Volume-based Pricing
A subscription and usage charge model where pricing changes based on the total number of units that are purchased.
Variable pricing refers to situations where the pricing for a specific product or service varies depending on characteristics of the sale such as geographic location, customer affiliation to an affinity group, or the presence of a seasonal discount.
Virtual Goods
Virtual goods are non-physical objects that are purchased for use in online communities or online games. Virtual goods may be services instead of goods. Sales of virtual goods are sometimes referred to as micro transactions. Virtual goods may be sold by companies that operate social networks, community sites or online games.
Voice 2.0
Voice 2.0 is used to describe the trends, technologies and applications used to bring IP telephony to the Web to create a new class of voice-enabled applications. Applications such as Skype, Phonetag, Voxeo, Tellme, SpinVox, Ribbit, IntellePeer, and Broadsoft Extend are examples of Voice 2.0 solutions and services.
Volume-based Pricing
A subscription and usage charge model where pricing changes based on the total number of units that are purchased.
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 refers to web applications which facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and mashups. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them. Connect:SM helps Web 2.0 businesses monetize their subscription offerings.
Web Services
Web services describe a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over IP. XML is used to tag the data, SOAP is used to transfer the data, WSDL is used for describing the services available and UDDI is used for listing what services are available. Unlike traditional client/server models, web services do not provide the user with a GUI. Web services instead share business logic, data and processes through a programmatic interface across a network. Developers can add the Web service to a GUI (such as a Web page or an executable program) to offer specific functionality to users. Web services allow different applications from different sources to communicate with each other without time-consuming custom coding, and because all communication is in XML, web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language.
Web 2.0 refers to web applications which facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and mashups. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them. Connect:SM helps Web 2.0 businesses monetize their subscription offerings.
Web Services
Web services describe a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over IP. XML is used to tag the data, SOAP is used to transfer the data, WSDL is used for describing the services available and UDDI is used for listing what services are available. Unlike traditional client/server models, web services do not provide the user with a GUI. Web services instead share business logic, data and processes through a programmatic interface across a network. Developers can add the Web service to a GUI (such as a Web page or an executable program) to offer specific functionality to users. Web services allow different applications from different sources to communicate with each other without time-consuming custom coding, and because all communication is in XML, web services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language.
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