The following diagram shows a typical architecture of a Billing System.

Billing System Architecture

Use cases and Process Flow

To simplify the process we will introduce a simple system usage scenario as shown in the following figure.

The system user navigates through the company site and views company services, and he decides to order one of the available services. If he has no account, he signs up for a new account, else he signs in. Then the user asks to conduct an order with the selected service. The service may be prepaid where he has to pay to have credits to use the service, or it may be postpaid, where he has to pay if the service has installation or setup fees, and later on he will pay for his usage of each billing cycle

Convergent billing major use case

Use case: Description

• Uniform product cataloge: 1. One of the keys of a convergent system is its ability to bundle diverse products together to form hybrid services and offer to customers. 2. Single product and service which could accommodate all services and product definitions

• Real time charging: The charging system needs to interact with next generation IMS network elements for capturing the usage information in online.

• Unified customer hierarchy:Convergent systems support all subscriptions across services payment modes

• Single bill:It is a combination of all the use cases mentioned above and in addition, bringing a capability to consolidate all charges, across service and products to form a single bill.