This page contains key billing terminology and concepts from a definition of billing software to a discussion of consolidated bill statements and types of charges.

Below, we provide a Glossary of Billing Terminology with hints and advice when selecting a billing system.

Definition: Billing Software

Software which automates the process of charging customers for products and services. This may include maintaining customer records as well as the products and services that they have purchased.

Types of Billing Software for Service Providers

We have defined two broad classes of billing software:

1. Consolidation systems — gather billing events from several systems and merge the billing events to create a single invoice with all of the charges. These systems often have one or more billing periods to mark the cut off date and time for charges.
2. Real-time systems — decrement a balance as billing events occur. When the customer’s balance reaches a threshold, the billing system may terminate the customer’s ability to use the service. Frequently these systems are used for prepaid or time-based services.

Parallels Business Automation is a consolidator which combines charges from multiple systems onto a single invoice. Parallels Business Automation’s open API allows service providers to add new interfaces and automate more processes as required. Parallels Business Automation provides the ability to terminate all customer services if a customer’s balance has not been paid in a pre-defined amount of time.

Types of Charges

Flexible billing systems can manage a variety of recurring and non-recurring charges.

• Recurring charge — a fee paid over the length of a term period which often applies to ongoing services. A recurring charge is part of a subscription which may include one-time setup costs and renewal costs at the end of the term length.
• Non-recurring charge — a one time fee paid which often applies to the delivery of products or services.
• Credits and adjustments — a billing adjustment may be initiated by a customer or automatically applied as the result of a promotion. Several reasons for making an adjustment include: goodwill, promotions, or invalid charges.

Additionally, each charge may have associated taxes. These taxes are based on the tax zone of the customer, the originating point of the service, and the tax zone of the service provider.

Alphabetized Glossary of Billing Software Terminology

Billing Cycle and Billing Period:
The billing period is a fixed amount of time between invoices. During the billing period, a customer may accrue several charges which are totaled and presented on a single invoice. The billing cycle is the time of the month or time of the year when the billing period begins. Your billing system should allow you to select different cycles for different users in order to spread the work of invoicing and customer service evenly over the month or year.

Consolidated / Unified Billing:
The process of delivering all charges from several disparate systems on a single bill. Consolidated billing is an important driver of customer satisfaction and a key factor in reducing operations costs. Billing platforms with a robust API allow you to merge information from several sources onto a single bill. Part of the challenge involves managing different types of account identifiers to ensure that a customer referenced by a social security number on one system can be matched to records where the customer is referenced by account number or address.

E-commerce:
Electronic commerce systems may be real-time or batched. Real-time systems require complex fraud analysis systems to prevent the unauthorized use of service by criminals with fraudulent payment mechanisms. Batch systems queue a number of orders for manual approval or batch submission.

Grandfathering:
Pricing and service plan changes are a necessary part of marketing plans and service delivery. Each time you want to change a plan with existing customers, you need to decide whether to allow existing customers to be "grandfathered". This means that the customers will be able to keep their existing plan and price forever — or until the next contract renewal period. Customers who are not grandfathered are immediately switched to the new rates.

Hold and Release Funds:
Customer service personnel may be authorized to enter credits up to a certain amount. Above this amount, the credit memos will be put into a hold status so that they can be approved. This approval process ensures that customer service does not accidentally or maliciously post a an incorrect or excessive credit to a customer’s account.

Invoices and Payments:
At the end of a billing period, the billing software creates an invoice which will be delivered to the customer. (Parallels Business Automation allows you to deliver the invoice via text, html, or paper mail) This invoice indicates that the buyer must pay the seller the agreed amount of money.

Automated payments are often made through a banking system which can be linked to the billing system via a payment gateway. Manual payments, such as those received by check or cash, can be entered directly into the system. Most billing procedures require approval of payments by somebody other than the person who entered the payment record.

Reseller Plans:
A robust billing system should support several types of reseller plans. Multi-tiered reseller plans can support several layers of resellers. Each reseller has visibility into the resellers and end-users accounts which fall below it on the hierarchy. A listing of four common plans is provided below:

• Referral Programs — Sales agents sell existing services and collect a commission amount. The commission amount depends upon the volume of sales.
• Unbranded Resale — The reseller sets prices, but maintains service provider branding and plans.
• Private Label Resale — The reseller re-brands service offerings defined by the service provider. The re-branding of services may involve switching logos or it might be as complex as using different payment gateways, customer support, and back-office support processes.
• Flexible Resale — Resellers can create unique service plans and apply a unique brand. The reseller utilizes the service provider’s infrastructure, but has a completely separate face to the customer.

White Labeling:
A type of reseller arrangement where the reseller contracts with the service provider to deliver a fixed set of services to a particular area or market. Under a white-label arrangement, the reseller can establish unique pricing — provided the resellers rates are higher than the wholesale rates offered by the underlying service provider. White label services may be either branded or unbranded, depending upon the agreement with the service provider. See resale plans for more details.

Workflow:
Workflow involves processing orders that are placed directly with the billing system. In this scenario the billing system acts as a hub for fraud screening, order processing, and order fulfillment. For this reason, the billing system is often referred to a business support system since many business processes must be managed by the system which prepares invoices and collects payments.

Introduction
Parallels Business Automation delivers a configurable and customizable billing system so that service providers can offer unique services to their customers. Parallels Business Automation’s flexibility makes it the ideal platform to support many different sales and business models. Service providers can use Parallels Business Automation to sell through partnership channels. The page includes a discussion of different business models as well as branding techniques that are supported by Parallels Business Automation.

Reseller Market
Web design companies, ISPs, and application development companies are examples of firms with loyal clients who have an interest in hosting web sites or applications. Many of these companies want to offer hosting services to their client base, but do not have the expertise and experience to offer web hosting. Additionally, hosting is not the focus of these firms, so they do not want to invest a lot of time and capital in a business that they do not completely understand.

Building hosting, Cloud, SaaS services, etc from the ground up can be a time consuming and capital intensive process for people looking to get into the market. By offering white label services, service providers who have made this investment can assist other providers in starting a hosting business and take advantage of the additional sales that the reseller generates.

A reseller offering is ideal for the types of companies listed above because they can support their customers by offering turnkey services and make additional revenue from the sale of hosted services. Many times clients of these companies are willing to pay them a premium for service, because they know and trust the people that have built their website, offer them Internet access, or build software applications for them.

Reseller Capabilities
Parallels recognizes that service providers acquire customers through a variety of direct and indirect mechanisms. Many service providers utilize both methods, supplementing direct online sales with reseller and partner channels. Parallels Business Automation was designed to support all types of sales methods, including direct channels such as web advertising and indirect channels via partner programs.

Reseller sales models are complex to implement and manage. Parallels Business Automation simplifies this process so service providers can quickly launch and easily manage new resale channels. The Parallels Business Automation software manages the complexities of branding, reporting, and service delivery so service providers can focus on selling unique plans and reacting to market needs.

There are several key requirements for delivering services to resellers. Key requirements include:

• Agent and Reseller business models
• Reseller branding
• Reseller service plans offered by the service provider
• Customer service plans offered by resellers
• Reseller control panels
• Reseller specific promotions and discounts
• Reseller announcements
• Reseller reports
• Reseller online store
• Sub-resellers

Parallels Business Automation exceeds expectations in meeting all of the requirements listed above. Service providers can make all of the services that they sell available to their resellers.

Storefront Branding
The most common requirement for branding is the online storefront. Using a web-based storefront customers can purchase services made available by the reseller. Most resellers require a branded ordering process with two primary requirements.

Visual appearance
The look and feel of the storefront needs to match or complement the reseller’s website. This includes fonts, colors, and layout.

The storefront should be accessed by a URL which includes the top level domain name of the reseller. For example, resellers want their storefront to be located at www.reseller.com or http://storefront.resellers.com instead of http://storefront.crucialserver.com.

Parallels Business Automation implements the branded storefront by creating a single website for each reseller that requires customized branding. This website is actually a limited service plan which contains an IP address, DNS records, disk space, ftp access, file manager, and traffic limits. By assigning this service plan to resellers, they receive a website that they can manage and brand according to their needs.

Resellers who want to modify their storefront branding can login to their reseller control panel to select the skin and logos that they would like to appear in their control panel. This can be done without any programming knowledge.

Control Panel Branding
After end user customers are enrolled, they access a control panel to configure and manage various aspects of their service. As with the storefront, the end user control panel consists of two primary branding requirements: (1) a look and feel that is complementary to the reseller’s brand and (2) a URL linked to the reseller’s top level domain. Parallels Business Automation delivers both of these requirements.

Parallels Business Automation provides not only the flexibility to create customized screens for end users, but also the ability to create a customized look and feel for sub-resellers.

Reseller Control Panels
The same branding offered for the customer control panels is also available for the reseller control panels. This provides the reseller’s staff with branded panels for customer service, accounting, and service management. Resellers benefit from this feature when they outsource services to external firms who may not be as familiar with their company branding.

Notification and Messaging Branding
Resellers can modify the notification messages that are delivered to customers. The notification messages are the system generated emails and notifications which are delivered when specific events occur. Some of these messages include: accepted order notifications, invoices, late payment warnings, mailbox limit warnings, service renewal notifications, password reminders, and other messages.

Summary
The hosting market is a booming sales opportunity for service providers and resellers. Millions of small businesses are quickly adopting on-demand services such as web hosting, SaaS, database hosting, and hosted mail services.

Parallels Business Automation meets the market demands for service providers who want to offer branded reseller services. Service providers who select Parallels Business Automation as their billing platform can offer their resellers completely customizable skins, customizable service plans, customized workflows, branded URLs, and several other features. Several leading "white label" service providers do not offer these advanced features to their resellers.

Parallels Business Automation also provides flexible business models so service providers can offer one or more different financial arrangements to resellers. The service provider can provide bulk services and allow the reseller to re-brand unique offers, or the service providers can limit the reseller offerings to specific service plans. Through the introduction of unique service plans, service providers can provision reseller customers on specific servers so an over-aggressive reseller will not impact the service of other customers.

Parallels Business Automation provides the flexibility for service providers to grow their services and their reseller plans. As more and more services are launched, Parallels Business Automation allows the service provider to easily make these services available to resellers. Parallels Business Automation also delivers multiple levels of resellers, so resellers can enroll sub-resellers.

Flexible branding, flexible business models, scalable platforms, and customizable service offers make Parallels Business Automation a superior billing and BSS platform for delivering services through resellers.