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Every month telecom operators receive bills from tower companies for infrastructure and energy consumption. They need to reconcile and validate these bills; however in absence of accurate inputs and lack of automation, this is time consuming and is a resource intensive activity.

Business Challenges:

1.Current bill validation process is manual, which is very time consuming and error prone
2.Complex master service agreements with Tower Companies.
3.Data inconsistency due to lack of single authentic source for consumption and site asset leading to incorrect billing.
4. Approval process largely on mails or paper
5. Retrieval of old invoices and input data for billing is not stored
6. No audit trails available across the entire invoice to payment approval process
7. Person dependent

The Solution

Infozech’s iRecon has following modules to solve the major business challenges through a consolidated platform:

1.Infrastructure Provider Billing and Energy Billing – iBill:

• iBill is a single billing platform for generating energy as well as infrastructure bills.
• Master database: This module enables capturing of entire site asset data and energy consumption data into the iBill system, on the basis of which pro forma billing is done.
• Configuration of Master Service agreement: This module allows the user to define the master service agreement and attach charges to them.
• Billing Engine fetches the site asset data and consumption data from the database and calculates the pro forma billing amount based on the master service agreement and charges configured in the system.

2. Invoice reconciliation:

• iRecon validates following parameters for IP bill validation:

a) Site count and site type (GBT or RTT) is validated with the last month passed bill
b) BTS type is validated Indoor or outdoor, on the basis of it, discount is given as per defined MSA
c) Tenancy count is validated with the last month passed bills
d) Bill start date and end date is validated as per RFI date and number of days of billing
e) IP base rate is validated as per MSA
f) Radio & Microwave antenna count is validated with the last month passed bills
g) Tower height is validated
h) Monthly site rent is validated with the last month passed bills
i) Discount offered by tower company

• iRecon validates following parameters for P&F bill validation :

For actual consumption MSA:

a) Site count and site type (GBT or RTT) is validated with the last month passed bill
b) BTS type is validated Indoor or outdoor, on the basis of it, discount is given as per defined MSA
c) Tenancy count is validated with the last month passed bills
d) Discount offered by tower company
e) Battery hours, Diesel CPH and EB CPH is validated as per MSA
f) Total Site load for the site is captured from bills submitted by tower companies for calculating the DG run hours and EB unit consumed for tenants existing at site

For fixed cost MSA:

a) Site count and site type (GBT or RTT) is validated with the last month passed bill
b) BTS type is validated Indoor or outdoor, on the basis of it, discount is given as per defined MSA
c) Tenancy count is validated with the last month passed bills
d) Discount offered by tower company
e) Base unit rate of DG and EB

• Once the above mentioned parameters are validated, iRecon reconciles IP and P&F bills submitted by tower company, and IP fee-P&F bill generated by iBill System
• Any mismatches in billing amount are highlighted for review.

3. Approval Process

• iBill has a configurable approval process where the approval hierarchy can be defined for the invoice.
• Approver has the right to either Approve, Reject or mark a site as Disputed.
• Approver can also modify the billing fields and rates during approval.

4. Dispute Management:

• iRecon has a dispute handling mechanism. If the invoice sent by tower company doesn’t matches the invoice generated by telecom operator then adjustment can be made in the form of credit or debit, which would be calculated after reconciling the monthly bill with the amount charged in the invoice for the particular month.
• It maintains historical bills which can be referred in case of dispute

Key Benefits

1.Accurate billing
2.Automates bill reconciliation processes
3.Generates accountability and transparency in billing reconciliation process
4.Leads to reduction in number of outstanding bills
5.Maintains historical information. Thus, also ensuring the complete information during audits.
6.Flexible & configurable, rule based billing logic layer
7.Easy integration with third party systems
8.Ensure stringent Service level agreement for billing reconciliation in terms of quality and timely output.