Note 43: Rating Transaction Storage

Posted: 24 December 2007

Prebill Transaction Storage

Once processed, rated transactions must be stored until required for bill cycle extraction (post-paid processing), or may be used for preparing a transaction statement (prepaid processing). A transaction history may still be required even when no paper invoice or statement is supplied to the customer (e.g. internet music downloads). Transactions can be stored in either the billing system, or, where separate, be held in rating until required. Depending on how they are stored, transactions can be accessed for:

Customer inquiries: Performed by customers directly against their account
Customer inquiries: Performed by the biller's staff on behalf of customers
Internal processing: Performed by the biller in areas such as fraud prevention
Credit Management: High transaction levels can be an indicator of increased credit risk
End-of-month financial processing: The accrued revenue (earned-but-unbilled) can be calculated from the rated amounts. This avoids the need to re-rate the entire transaction base at end-of-month.

Prepaid transactions, if stored, can be provided online or via paper settlement allowing customers to verify their balance against their payments and network usage. Once transactions have been included on a post-paid bill, or prepaid statement, they may be retained only for a short period. The storage required to retain all historical transactions online can be substantial. In billing systems with high transaction volumes (e.g. telecommunications), prebill transaction storage is often one of the two largest data repositories. The other large data repository is the one holding details of the bill since it often includes all the same (rated usage) transactions.

Operational aspects of rating

A biller operating in a competitive market (assuming no other changes in the network), will reflect any (re)packaging of its existing offerings in rating. Marketing imperatives may dictate frequent repackaging with short lead times. The speed with which changes can be made, and the versatility of the available rating methods determines the level of support billing can provide. Billers who do not compete for customers will still require accurate rating for mass market customers, and possibly customised offerings for larger, corporate customers.

Business involvement in rating (billing)

To catch difficult implementation issues for new product offerings early, it is desirable that ongoing consultation is performed between the biller's product design, marketing, fraud, revenue assurance and billing groups. Such consultation can address how the rating (billing) will be achieved before too much effort has been committed. The discussions will also inform and guide the biller's future product development, reducing the likelihood of difficult solutions in the future.

If a difficult rating approach is selected, or one that is unsupported by the biller's billing system vendor, then additional system development may be required, with its related delay and cost. Alternatively, manual processing may be required, but this may be unable to scale or be more expensive to operate in the long term. The Fraud and Revenue Assurance groups can indicate where new products may be exploited, and their inclusion in the design process will allow monitoring systems to be updated in a timely manner.

System processing load

Rating is a process that can, and should, be performed gradually as transactions are received. This allows the workload to be distributed over a wider time period rather than concentrated in a short period (say) once per month when customers are billed. The biller's infrastructure can then operate with a (cheaper) lower peak processing requirement. As long as the system can rate transactions within a reasonable time period, (as specified by each biller), then the system will be 'fit for purpose'. Growth in the number of customers, services and offerings will tend to increase the load (and time pressure) on the rating (billing) systems; system tuning and new computer hardware will tend to reduce the time pressure on processing.

System load is more important to billers who generate usage charges (e.g. telecommunications, tollways) since the number of these will be many times the workload of any recurring or one-time charges that are applied. Those billers who just use a recurring charge (e.g. cable TV) for their billing will have a workload that is orders of magnitude lower, and one that may be concentrated more in their billing cycle rather than distributed across the rating process.

Some circumstances will require that rerating is performed, and this can cause a high, short-term processing load on the rating system as transactions that were processed over days and weeks are reprocessed in minutes or hours. Rerating can be required when threshold levels are reached in rating, or when configuration errors require that transactions are reprocessed to use the correct rates. To reduce the impact on regular processing, this rerating may be staged to ensure that regular service levels can be maintained.

Timing

Rating may be performed after the fact (e.g. charging for water) or in real-time (e.g. prepaid phone calls). There is a substantial difference in complexity between these two approaches. Achieving real-time processing requires high-availability, high-speed infrastructure to ensure that the correct price is supplied quickly at all times. 'After the fact' transaction rating can be performed with some timing latitude as the rated price of a call is not required to execute a network event (e.g. phone call).

Tags: Billing, Rating, Operational, Timing, System Load