Brm documentation download

Collecting Revenue Assurance Data. Collecting General Ledger Data. Describes how to use and manage general ledger data in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. This guide is intended for accountants, business planners, operations personnel, and system administrators. Describes how to configure the taxation software in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. This guide is intended for those who configure taxation software and enable it to work with third-party products.

Managing Accounts Receivable. Describes how to use and manage accounts receivable data in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. Configuring and Collecting Payments. Describes how to use Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management to collect and manage payments data.

This guide is intended for operations personnel. Collections Manager. This guide is intended for anyone who installs, configures, or administers Collections Manager and for those who manage collections for your business.

This guide is intended for business analysts. Describes how to upgrade your existing system to later versions of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. This guide is intended for system integrators, system administrators, database administrators, and others who install and upgrade the product from release to release.

Schema and Index Changes. Describes the object definition and index changes, additions, and deletions in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. System Administrator's Guide. This guide is intended for system administrators who maintain and manage the system. Provides guidelines and recommendations for managing security in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management.

It also describes how to install the product securely. This guide is intended for developers and system administrators. This guide is intended for developers. Developer's Reference. Provides reference information for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management application programming interfaces.

Describes how to use Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Content Manager to process authentication, authorization, and accounting requests from content providers. This guide is intended for system integrators, system administrators, database administrators, and other individuals who install and configure Email Manager. JCA Resource Adapter. Synchronization Queue Manager. Describes how to use the Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Synchronization Queue data manager to synchronize pricing data between the product and external customer relationship management applications.

Web Services Manager. This guide is intended for system integrators, system administrators, and others who install and configure web services. This guide is intended for all users. Describes new features, known problems, and fixed issues in this release of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. Licensing Information User Manual. The bill includes all of the charges collected in the monthly accounting cycle.

Typically, a bill is created monthly, at the same time as the accounting cycle. However, you can bill for multiple months for example, every two months, quarterly, or annually. In that case, the bill includes balance impacts from multiple accounting cycles. The collection of balance impacts into a bill is called the billing cycle. Figure shows how a billing cycle can include multiple accounting cycles:.

You process BRM-initiated payments by automatically requesting payments from a payment processor. You process externally initiated payments by sending invoices, receiving the payments, and processing the payments in batches. When the payment is recorded in the BRM database, the customer's account balance is updated automatically.

For more information on payment processing, see "About Managing Payments". Figure shows how BRM compiles bills and requests payments from customers.

Whenever the customer's account is modified in a manner that affects an invoice already sent to the customer, BRM enables you to generate a new type of bill and invoice:.

Corrective bill. A bill containing changes to item charges that affect the amount due in a finalized bill. Corrective bills are associated with the bill they correct, but they do not have the same bill number. However, they share the same object identifier in the BRM database with the bill they correct, enabling you to retrieve all the information on a set of bills. Corrective invoice. An invoice containing changes to an invoice already generated and sent to a customer.

Corrective invoices are issued for simple corrections, such as address or language changes, and for charge corrections that affect the amount due in a finalized bill. CSRs can use Customer Center to generate corrective bills for a specified account and billing period. This utility can generate corrective bills individually or, when large numbers of bills are changed by processes such as rerating and backdating, in a batch.

By default, BRM supports either of the following formats for a corrective invoice:. Replacement invoice. Adjustments are included for the corrected items and events that apply to the current corrective bill. Invoice correction letter. A customer's billing type determines the charges that are included in a bill. There are two billing types:. With open item accounting , a customer is billed only for charges in the current bill.

If a customer does not pay a bill, the next bill does not include charges for the bill that the customer did not pay. You typically use open item accounting for invoice accounts. Each invoice includes the charges that apply to a single billing cycle.

If a customer does not pay a bill, the next invoice includes the charges from the previous invoice. With balance forward accounting , a customer's bill includes all the charges that a customer owes, including those from previous billing cycles.

If a customer does not pay a bill, the next bill includes the charges from the previous bill. Accounts for customers who pay by credit card should always use balance forward accounting. Balance forward accounting is the default. You can create account groups where one customer pays the bill for a group of accounts.

For example, a corporate account might include multiple dialup accounts, but all the billing is handled by the corporation. Rating calculates how much a customer should be charged for usage, subscription fees, and so forth. Rating determines the charges, stores the charges in bill items, and updates the customer's account balance. Billing does not involve any measuring of events; billing simply collects existing balance impacts and creates a bill.

The service or action that generated the events is irrelevant to creating the bill. By default, BRM is configured to accept several different types of payment methods for example, credit card, direct debit, cash, and check. Usually, each customer account is set up to use one payment method; however, you can set up an individual customer with multiple payment methods.

The payment method determines how the customer's payment is submitted to BRM: directly by a payment processor, such as a payment gateway, or manually by a payment clerk who uses Payment Tool to load a batch file sent from a bank or automated clearing house an externally initiated payment.

If the submitted payment passes validation, the customer's account balance is updated accordingly. If the payment fails validation, the payment is handled according to the business policies implemented in your system configuration. If a payment is not valid, save it to the payment suspense account so that the error can be fixed and the payment applied to the correct account at a later time.

Payment suspense management must be enabled. You can configure your business policies to handle overpayments and underpayments, and you can use Payment Tool or Customer Center to allocate payments to accounts or to specific bill and bill items.

If you are not sure how to allocate a payment, you can leave it unallocated at the account. For example, the usage item stores all the charges from usage fees, and the cycle forward and cycle arrears items store charges from different types of monthly subscription fees. Most customer management tasks are accomplished by CSRs using Customer Center or a third-party customer management system.

You can set up Web-based customer self-care so that your customers can handle their own administration tasks, such as changing login names and passwords. Junior CSRs typically create accounts, check customer account balances, change customer login names and passwords, and answer common customer questions. Senior CSRs handle payment disputes, change credit limits, and change account status.

Senior CSRs can also validate the work of junior CSRs for example, by making sure that new accounts are created correctly and have all the necessary information. A BSP is a company that offers Internet services under its own brand name but does not actually operate the service.

If you are a host provider, you can set up and maintain many separate brands of Internet service in a single BRM system. You can:. You can create reports based on revenue recognition for example, billed, unbilled, earned, and unearned. The ARSummary report summarizes the amounts currently due in a specified time period. The CCExpire report shows information about all accounts whose credit cards will expire in a specified period. The UsageTimeCurrent report displays the number of customer dialup sessions that are open in a specified time period.

The BRM system is an integral part of your business. Figure shows how BRM components work with your other software components.

BRM clients interface to your services and capture data about customer service usage. For example, when a customer logs in, the Connection Manager determines how to validate the login name and sends a validation request to the BRM database. For example, a request for a login validation or credit card verification is translated into a database query. The BRM database stores data in objects. For example, there are objects that store information about accounts, events, bills, services, and price list elements such as products.

The account object includes fields that contain the customer's first name, last name, and account status. Event objects include fields that contain the start and stop times of the event, the account that generated the event, and the balance impact of the event. Configuration objects contain data used by the system.

Developers who create custom applications, or customize BRM source code, must know about objects and fields. Changing data in the database without using the API can corrupt the data.

Create a price list that includes a plan for the IP service. The customer logs in at 10 p. The login name and password are found in the database. This identifies the account and enables BRM to check if the customer is authorized to use the IP service. In this case, the customer has purchased a plan that includes the service, paid all bills, and has not exceeded a credit limit, so authorization is granted.

The customer connects to the Internet for three hours. When the customer logs off, BRM records the start and stop times of the session in a session event:. BRM rates the event. The connection time was for three hours, but one hour was on the weekend, when Internet access is free. The customer's billing date is January When you run the daily billing utilities on January 16, a billing utility determines that the customer's account is ready for billing.

Because the customer pays by credit card, another billing utility creates a credit card transaction for the total amount of the bill and sends the transaction to a credit card processor.

BRM automatically sends an email invoice to the customer, notifying the customer of the month's charges. This invoice is for the customer's information only. In that case, it can use the optional branding functionality to manage existing accounts separately from accounts inherited from the other ISP. Using various advertising methods, ISP-1 provides a toll-free number that customers can call to register. These customers talk to CSRs, who use Customer Center or a third-party customer management system to create the account.

To encourage online registration, the purchase fee is waived if the customer registers online. To implement this feature, plans are created without a purchase fee, and the purchase fee is added as an override by the CSR. To handle corporate accounts, such as those that use the T-1 service, ISP-1 keeps track of sales representative and account owner information.

Customers can change passwords, look at their balance, update credit card information, and change name and address information. All of these customer management tasks can also be handled by CSRs using Customer Center or a third-party customer management system.

In addition, CSRs handle product upgrades and billing disputes. CSR support is managed as follows:. Some CSRs handle account creation and product upgrades only.

Other CSRs handle simple maintenance tasks, such as changing passwords and billing information. Advanced CSRs handle billing disputes. In addition, ISP-1 has a technical support group dedicated to maintaining its ISP network and dealing with access issues. This technical support group has extended hours, seven days per week. This minimal plan offers Internet access and Web space, but no email. The target customer is a casual-use individual. If a customer cancels the plan, the monthly fee is prorated; the customer does not have to pay for the part of the month that was not used.

If the customer cancels the plan, the monthly fees are prorated; the customer does not have to pay for the part of the month that was not used.

This plan offers Internet access, Web space, email, and additional premiums. The target customer is a high-use individual or family account. The customer pays a yearly rate that is considerably less than the yearly cost of a monthly rate. In exchange, there is a lack of proration and a cancel fee for early cancellation.

Accounts that pay by credit card use anniversary billing the billing day of month is the day that the account was created , although customers can change their billing day of month. This change is handled by a CSR. Premium customers cannot change their billing day of month.

Invoice accounts are paid by check. Payments that cannot be validated are compiled into a separate batch of payments and are processed by a member of the accounting department. Invoice accounts are all billed on the 15th of each month. A customer changing the payment method from invoice to credit card can choose a different billing day of month. BRM includes the following applications that you use to manage customers, process, payments, and configure your system:.

To register customers, manage customer information, and handle billing disputes, use Customer Center. Figure shows the full Customer Center interface, with the Summary tab active.

By default, this tab is active when you first open an account:. To process externally initiated payments, such as payments by check, and to process payment reversals and refunds, use Payment Tool.

Figure shows the Check Payment Batch window, where you process a batch of check payments:. To perform business management tasks, such as creating brands and setting up CSR and other access privileges, use Configuration Center. BRM developers and administrators use Configuration Center for advanced business management tasks.

Configuration Center can contain any combination of the components listed in Table , depending on what you have installed:. Table Combination of Components. In Figure , Configuration Center contains all its possible applications:. In addition to the client applications, BRM includes command-line utilities. These utilities typically have a narrow purpose. Creating services for example, setting up the hardware necessary for your services, such as terminal servers and IP telephony gateways, and installing and configuring optional service integration components.

Creating your price list, including creating resources, and setting up event maps and ratable user metrics RUMs so your system can capture and rate customer service usage. For example, you can do the following:. Collect additional data about a customer for example, the customer's bank ABA number, employee number, or member referral information.

You customize business functionality by editing configuration files and by customizing BRM source code. You do not need to be a programmer to edit configuration files, but you must be a programmer to customize source code. Client applications run on the Windows platform and have a graphical user interface. A service is a capability that you provide to customers, such as Internet access, email, or telephony. It enables you to do the following:.

Authenticate and authorize customers, which enables you to activate and inactivate accounts automatically for example, as soon as a credit limit is reached. Provision services based on the products that a customer owns. For example, you can create products that determine the size of a customer's mailbox or connection bandwidth. For example, if the customer has exceeded a credit limit, BRM can deny authorization to use the service.

BRM uses this data to measure, rate, and charge for service usage. Web-based applications that customers use to change their account status, upgrade their services, and pay their bills. An online registration package requiring no existing Internet access and distributed on a variety of shareware CDs. An application that runs nightly, searches for accounts that have a free trial account, and sends email when the free trial account is about to expire.

An application that runs nightly to check the age of an account. If the account is over two years old, the customer is automatically upgraded to a discounted plan. An application that monitors the customer's disk space on a server and charges more if allotted disk space is exceeded.

BRM is modular and extensible by design. Many customers add custom interfaces to external components. Some customers use external components instead of standard BRM components. For example, some customers use BRM rating but use their own proprietary billing system. Other customers use a third-party customer management system. Business information distribution services for example, services that automatically distribute the results of database reports.

You can change some information displayed in client applications to support your business needs. Almost all business policies have a default implementation. For example, the default billing cycle is one month. You can change the default implementation by editing configuration files, or customizing policy code.

Most BRM features can be customized without any programming. For example, most price list implementations, CSR-based registration, and billing setup requires no programming to customize. The following customizations require some programming:. Creating services. If you offer a service that is not supported by default in BRM, such as a fax service, you must create a custom service to capture and rate fax-related events. Modifying some BRM defaults. In some cases, you must modify policy source code to change BRM behavior.

For example, to rate Internet access by the number of bytes downloaded rather than by connection time, you must edit source code. Creating custom applications. Some BRM implementations can be greatly enhanced by creating simple applications that manipulate data in the BRM database.

For example, you can write applications to do the following tasks:. Customizing applications. To add entirely new tabs or make major changes to functionality, you must use the Customer Center SDK. Supporting a legacy system.

If you already have data stored in a database, you can write a Data Manager DM to provide an interface to that database. Customizing event notification. You use event notification to set up processes to run automatically. For example, you can customize BRM to send an email message to a customer automatically when a credit limit is nearly expired.

Implementing advanced pricing features. Some pricing features for example, product-level provisioning require some programming for the initial setup. An asset of economic value, such as US dollars, or a non-currency asset, such as Internet access hours. A BRM process, typically run daily, that compiles the fees incurred by customers into bill objects stored in the BRM database.

A one-month period during which all of a customer's charges are calculated, but not billed. Charges are recorded in the customer's balance. The timing of the accounting cycle for a customer is based on the customer's billing day of month.

The time period during which charges accumulate in an account before a bill object is created and a request for payment is generated. One billing cycle can contain one or more accounting cycles. A collection of data stored in the BRM database about a specific customer.

Account information includes:. A commodity sold by your company and that your customers can purchase and use, such as an email address or an Internet connection. When customers use a service, they generate billable events, which you use to bill customers. Event objects include fields that record the start and stop times of the event, the account that generated the event, and the balance impact of the event. What Is BRM? When you build your business around BRM, you can more effectively manage the revenue life cycle: BRM revenue generation enables you to deliver services with optimal pricing to your customers.

About Charging Customers for Your Services You define how to charge for your services by creating a price list. For example, your price list might specify charges for wireless usage as follows: 10 cents per minute for peak-time usage. You use Pricing Center to create and modify your price list. About Billable Events In a typical business day, thousands of customers make phone calls or access the Internet, generating millions of interactions that must be managed and charged for.

For example: When a customer logs in, or makes a telephone call, BRM creates a session event, which stores data about the session, such as the start time and end time. Applies a charge to the resulting measurement.

Adds the charge to the customer's account balance. You can rate usage in two ways: Real-time rating monitors and rates the service usage as it happens, such as Internet access.

About Real-Time Rating Real-time rating is used for services such as dialup access and email. For example, to rate Internet access in real time: BRM determines the length of the session by comparing the start time and end time.

BRM adds the total charge for the event to the customer's account balance. About Batch Rating Batch rating is typically used for rating telephony services, where large amounts of events are recorded in files. For example, to rate telephone calls: Pipeline Manager reads the data from CDRs to determine the time and duration of the calls.

Note: You can also use the UE Loader to load data from an event log file as billable events and rate them using BRM real-time rating opcodes. When the events are loaded, BRM rates the events and updates the customers' account balances. Defining How to Rate Billable Events in Your Price List When you create your price list, you specify the following: What types of events to rate for example, telephone calls or dialup usage events.

The balance impact for example, 10 cents per minute or 1 cent per byte. For example, a typical Internet service provider price list might include the following fees: A one-time account setup fee. A monthly account subscription fee. An hourly usage fee. To calculate taxes: When BRM rates a billable event, it collects information about the event that can be used for calculating taxes, such as the location of your business, the location of the customer, and customer tax exemptions.

BRM compiles the tax calculation data into a transaction and sends it to the tax database. BRM adds the tax amount to the customer's account balance. About Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Authentication, authorization, and accounting AAA define how you interact with your customers: Authentication provides a way for you to identify customers for example, by requiring a login name and a password.

Accounting tracks the resources used by the customer and enables you to rate usage. BRM performs accounting to collect usage information to rate the prepaid session. For example, for a telephone call: The network authenticates and authorizes the customer. The account is created in the database. At account creation, various events occur: The customer information is checked by the system to see whether it is valid and to ensure that all required information has been supplied. If there is a purchase fee, the customer is automatically charged.

If the service includes a phone number, the phone number is provisioned on the network. A welcome message is automatically sent to the customer.