Choosing The Right ISP Billing Software

ISP billing software is a high-end solution for organizations providing internet and VOIP services. This allows the organization to manage recurring billing to its customers, thus maintaining a tidy accounting system, transparent enough to enhance the profitability of the organization. In keeping your accounts tidy and with all the necessary information available at the click of a button, your customer relationship factor increases to a greater extent, keeping your customers happy. The software provides ease of day to day operations, efficiently managing your customers, with you having an access to a huge lot of useful management reports.

ISP billing software lets you set up role based security, where the administrators of the software can be assigned a role each, with its own username and password. This enables you to designate the role task to each of your administrators, which is or are related to the person concerned. You can further restrict your billing administrators to specific IP address for accessing the billing interface. The software features database back up at intervals, so that the data generated by you is protected in the event of any disaster. Over-all a good level of security is provided by the software, and also a safe guard against any data loss.

A few of the main features of ISP billing software is mentioned below:

Recurring billing: In ISP applications, any billing software that you use should have the feature to support recurring billing. ISP billing software supports variable charges to be created for customers, which pertains to the level of service that is being offered. There are provisions to add as many recurring charges that you need to, to an account. Charges are automatically set up during billing process, with necessary appropriation of billing amount for those customers who activate and de-activate in the middle of the cycle.

Consumption billing: Consumption reading can be entered manually in alomost any format. You can configure the software with unlimited rate specifics and its components, where the rate component would consist of per-day, fixed charge and stepped-range components. Consumption-based components can have minimum amounts specified.

Invoicing: ISP billing software provides you with the facility to generate invoices for your customer. This is generally done for any chargeable maintenance and spare parts that might have been required during the maintenance. The invoices so generated, may be posted in your accounts books straight away, or may just be submitted to your customers as quotes and then posted as and when the quotes are accepted. The invoicing feature lets you set up accounts receivable, and revenue accounts for each of the items you deal with.

Penalty calculation: Penalties usually accrue on outstanding amounts. ISP billing software lets you calculate such penalties on the basis of the rates that you enter. You can set up an unlimited classification of penalties, and these could then be assigned to individual customer accounts. You can also set up minimum penalty amounts, or specify penalized items when you configure the software for penalty calculation.

Besides the above, advanced versions of ISP billing software has many other features, which include:

1. Subscriber Management
2. Individual and Corporate accounts
3. Prepaid and Postpaid billing
4. Prepaid card's management
5. Hourly, monthly and bandwidth billing
6. Flexible Billing Tariff
7. Auto provisioning with different E-mail servers
8. Web based subscriber self-care
9. Multiple reseller/dealer tiers
10. Online credit card transactions
11. Invoicing system
12. ISP billing in ASP model
13. Robust administrative and end-user security
14. Scalable application architecture

ISP billing software is ideally applicable to the following IP services:

1. Dial Up/DSL Service Providers
2. Broadband Service Providers
3. Hot Spot Operators
4. Wireless internet Service Providers
5. WiMax Service Providers

The other big advantage in ISP billing software is that you can generate management reports under various classifications, whether it is based on customers, date/time, or rates. You can generate such reports under the different account heads, bringing in more transparency to your financial dealings with your customers. These reports can be generated in various kinds of formats, such as, HTML, MS Excel, MS Word, etc.

In order that your business operates smoothly you need to maintain your accounts tidy. ISP billing software helps you to do that, saving considerable time and your effort. The application demands recurring billing and ISP billing software handles it all, re-generating the bills each time as per the period specified by you. You can configure the periodic bill generation from the daily schedule to yearly.

ISP billing software has the advanced feature of emailing your customers, warning them of the status of their outstandings, and informing them that their account is about to expire. It could be that some more information of the customer's credit card is required to continue billing. Or, the payment is long over-due, and unless the payment is made in time, the customer's account may be suspended. All these matters need to be related to the concerned customer and what is better than automatic emailing, which is one of the great features of ISP billing software.