Billing solutions

Bill with ease

Giacom is the UK’s leading provider of billing solutions to the ICT channel. Our software offers a range of features that will scale alongside your business growth and needs with solutions that will enable you to calculate customer bills with total accuracy and in compliance with industry regulation. It will then consolidate all fixed and variable charges for your services into one convenient bill dispatched to each customer.

Providing coherent consolidated billing is a major selling point for end-users, almost as important as cost savings. As you’d expect, our solutions work especially well when used to manage Giacom’s products and services, however, they are supplier agnostic and can be used to process charges from almost any other channel supplier.  

Bill whatever you want, however you want, our solutions are flexible and adaptable to your requirements.

End user self-service portals

Empower your end customers with an array of information and self-serve options in an online portal. Your customers can view their bills and bill status, as well as download pdfs and reports whenever they are needed, saving you time in managing now unnecessary emails and calls.

In addition, your customers can export usage and product breakdown information; access key metrics and reporting; self-serve on mobiles from managing bars to SIM swaps and PAC code requests; view and manage account information including Sub Site and Site User allocation; and view and manage bill limits and usage alerts

The portal’s look and feel can be customised and white-labelled with your own logos and colour scheme, making it totally consistent with your branding. Prominently placed advertising panels also provide you with options to promote additional products, services, and special offers.  

The customer experience is greatly enhanced by enabling end-users to monitor and manage services as required. You’ll also enjoy the dual benefit of reduced inbound calls and queries, lowering the cost of service by empowering end-users to help themselves.

Task automation

Our solutions have been designed to make life easy for you with a range of automated features that will save time and boost your productivity. 

CDR data imports/exports

This includes the automation of CDR management. Our solutions can locate and import CDRs as soon as they are made available by your suppliers. From here it will rate them according to each customer’s tariff then add any subsequent charges to the customer’s account ready to be billed. This process does not need to be supervised and will run over public holidays when staff are unlikely to be available. 

If suspicious activity or unexpectedly large costs are detected, the system can be set to alerts your billing personnel advising them to investigate.

If you resell services through your own partner network, our system can automatically generate CDR files and export them to an SFTP site where they can be downloaded by your channel partners.

Automated comms

This feature is ideal for ensuring certain regulatory obligations are met, such as the requirement to notify your customers when their current contract is ending, and what the best renewal deals are. Communications templates can be created with a variety of styling options to ensure a consistent look and feel with company branding. Communications can be triggered by a change of circumstances in a customer account, such as if they are approaching a renewal date or have re-signed a contract. 

Schedules can also be set for either one-off or repeat communications as required. For example, a communication could be scheduled to email a customer on a daily basis once their invoice has passed its due date.  

Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the process of checking what you have been charged by suppliers against what you are onward billing to your customers. With potentially hundreds of thousands of transactions taking place in a billing cycle, attempting to do this manually would be a labour-intensive exercise. Our system can automatically check all charges and ensure that a corresponding charge exists in customers accounts, notifying your personnel of any mismatches that might require further investigation.

Quote and provision services

Building quotes for customers that may include a wide range of products such as cloud services, mobile, broadband, fibre, Ethernet and more, can be a repetitive and time-consuming process. If you’re using multiple suppliers, this may require you to visit numerous portals and enter the same data repeatedly in order to source a product with the best balance of features and pricing. 

Our billing solutions offer optional provisioning solutions that allow users to enter the necessary data just once. Then, through integrations with supplier ordering systems including our Cloud Market platform, our solutions will return detailed results for available services that match the specified criteria, displaying the results in a clear, easily comparable format that can be exported for quoting purposes. 

We can also provide a customisable workflow framework for progressing quotes through to fulfilment and populating 

service data for the customer into the billing platform so that it is ready to be billed.

Revenue management

Revenue assurance 

Ensure you’re never overcharged by suppliers or underselling to customers. Our billing solutions offer advanced revenue assurance features that ensure you aren’t selling services at a loss and that suppliers are billing you 

at the correct rate. You can also create innovative packages and price plans to increase margin and add to the bottom line without necessarily increasing published tariffs.

Margin analysis

Our software provides you with powerful features for analysing your estate. This includes options to create and forecast innovative tariffs, contracts, and bundles for multiple services. It also provides valuable business intelligence, with reporting on everything from debtors to customer summaries, to business growth and more. 

Integration

If you have numerous BSS/OSS systems and data sources, our billing solutions can help you streamline, standardise and automate your processes, removing the need for duplicating information across different systems. Through API integration, we can help you to remove manual effort and automate processes giving you full access to your data, with options to create bespoke reports and dashboards.

Sage Integration

Keep data in sync

New customer accounts can be pushed to Sage automatically and their details updated either to or from Sage. The integration can be configured according to your requirements so that either Sage or the billing platform can act as the master system of record.

Integrated invoicing

Invoices generated in our billing solutions can be bulk posted to Sage’s sales ledger in a single click as part of the structured bill run process. They can then be broken down and monitored in Sage on an individual basis.

View transactions

Account transaction history for each customer, including payments received, outstanding balances and aged debt information can be made visible within our billing solutions. Using the invoice history screen, you can view customers’ transactions en masse.

Direct Debit oversight

Our billing solutions can create Direct Debit collection files for your bank and post payments back to the sales ledger. Because DD invoices can be flagged as paid in bulk in our system, the integration streamlines what can be a time-consuming, one-by-one process in Sage. Once invoices are marked as paid, there’s still an opportunity for a DD to bounce. With a simple click you can cancel and reissue invoices as required.

Support and consultancy services

Our commitment to developing innovative billing and provisioning software is matched by our commitment to providing comprehensive training, support and consultancy, ensuring you’re able to leverage maximum value from our solutions.

Bureau billing service

Rather than manage billing inhouse, you may prefer to use our Bureau Service. This provides a cost-effective way to outsource the bulk of your billing operations to us, ideal if you’re keen to take control of your billing but don’t yet have the time to manage it. With our Bureau Service, you can enjoy all the features and benefits that our solutions have to offer whilst entrusting this business-critical task to our team of experts. 

Our team is accredited for Ofcom’s Total Metering and Billing Systems (TMBS) scheme, ensuring billing accuracy and compliance with best practice.

Call in the experts

Our consultants are available onsite or remotely to work with your team and provide expert guidance on any areas of your billing operations that you would like to review. They are able to provide advice on anything from implementing new services, to revenue assurance, to fraud management, to boosting profitability. Our consultants can also perform maintenance on your system, such as database cleaning, to ensure it is optimised and performing at peak efficiency.

RPI increase

This service enables you to make large scale price increases to products and services across your entire customer base. Depending on the complexity of your estate, the process of increasing prices across a customer base can be a labour-intensive exercise with high risk of human error.  

Our RPI Increase Service enables you to outsource much of the work involved to our consultants, giving you the freedom to implement RPI increases consistently and at regular intervals without having to find additional resources in-house. The service also reduces the risk of error which can easily occur when manually completing bulk price changes. Prices can be changed in two ways, either by specifying a percentage for which all prices should be uplifted, or by advising of a specific value to which prices should be increased.