[UPDATE: Our New Telecom and CDR billing platform has been completed and we are offering the lowest prices in the market. Please visit our Home Page for more details or contact us for pricing]

As you can see on previous blog entries, we’ve been working on a new affordable telecom billing system for the last couple of months, and we are expecting to be done at some point in the middle of next year.

We’ve been receiving lots of emails, asking if there is an alternative telecom billing solution that can be used in the meantime, so we decided to offer what we’ve been doing for a couple of  telecom companies that recently approached us: We will host a database with your customer’s billing information and the call detail record (CDR) for every month, and then generate monthly invoices in a PDF format. Then, at the beginning of each month (or at your best convenience), all your telecom bills will be available for download from our secured ftp site.

Basically, all you need to do is send us the call usage from your telecom provider every month, and we will do the billing job for you. We will charge only 1 dollar for each customer you have.

Feel free to contact us at info@easytelecombilling.com if you are interested or if you have any questions about your telecom billing needs.

I needed to have a database that included customer contact info, services to be billed (telephone lines, PRI, ADSL, etc) and rates for long distance calls, so i set up a MySQL database server with tables that contained this data. Then got myself a reporting tool that will generate reports based on that info; and those reports were going to be the actual invoices to be sent to the customers.

Simple, right?…

Well, it was not!…

Getting the reports to capture the customer information and to show the services provided and the charges associated with them was pretty simple, but to charge each individual long distance call based on specific rates depending on the country/city the customer was calling to was a real challenge. You have to parse the country code from the originating telephone number and then match it with the proper rate. Country codes are all different, but some times a country code contains part of another code which makes things way more complicated.

On top of that, there is the provider CDR (Call Detail Record) which is the long distance usage for all your customers, and that usually comes in a .csv file. We had 3 different providers at the time, all with different CDR formats, so i had to spend hours every month in order to modify this files and make a ‘master’ one with a standard format that my reports (Invoices) could read.

Now you see how complicated things are when it comes to Telecom Billing. Specially when you want to bill services like Long Distance. And believe me, i looked around for a software that could do all this at affordable prices, and all i could find were these consulting companies that will charge you literally thousands of dollars to build a system like this for you. There were a couple of softwares that did all this, but they were so complicated (and still expensive) that you would end up spending an insane amount of resources and consulting fees just to set it up and get it up an running.

Our idea here at easytelecombilling.com is to develop a web application that you can access from anywhere and that it’s ready to start billing your customers. As simple as that! You throw your CDR’s in, set up (or import) your customers. Press a button and that’s it. Your invoices are ready. Our servers will do the hard work i was talking about, not you.

Feel free to contact us at info@easytelecombilling.com if you are interested or if you have any questions about your telecom billing needs.

I was lucky enough to start working there just when they started providing long distance service to their customers so i took on the task of generating invoices from a Call Detail Record or CDR (in our case was a simple .csv file) so we could charge customers for their long distance usage. After 3 years of working with them, i quit that job so i could direct my career into a more “Software Developer” direction, but i kept maintaining and running their Telecom Billing system. In fact, it has been two years since i left and i still do their Telecom Billing, which actually has became my side business.

In all these years i’ve been looking for Telecom Billing software out there, but all i could find were these enterprise level monsters that could keep you busy for months just to set up the application. There are even companies that will charge you thousands of dollars for developing and maintaining a system like the one i made! and that’s how i started easytelecombilling.com and this blog: i want to discuss and share the frustration of telecom resellers that can’t find a clean, lightweight and efficient application to bill their customers, and actually help them out based on my years of experience.

So stay tuned (you can subscribe to our RSS feed) and leave a comment if you wish to share your story.

Feel free to contact us at info@easytelecombilling.com if you are interested or if you have any questions about your telecom billing needs.