The Challenge

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In International Telecom Wholesale Business the validation of incoming invoices and
declarations as well as handling incoming dispute letters can be a time-consuming task. Vendors send various types of (paper) statement formats, sometimes covering multiple products and often holding large amounts of line items. Each month, incom-ing statements have to be captured and validated, disputes may have to be raised and payments need to be cleared out.

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Because of the tedious manual processes in place, most carriers tend to only focus on the very obvious anomalies, missing a lot of opportunities to reduce payments by disputing smaller discrepancies in reported versus expected cost. Similarly incoming disputes raised by customers should be managed and corrections on anti-cipated revenue need to be recorded in the general ledger.

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Operators today having business relationships with dozens or even hundreds of other carriers need to optimize margin by ensuring that they are in full control of pro-cesses involved with invoice validation and dispute management. They require business support systems that can automatically validate incoming statements against expected cost/revenue. Users should immediately be pointed to (favourable)

discrepancies. The system has to be designed to handle all kind of business cases, including complex cases where vendors tend to send statements covering multiple billing cycles, include supplementary charges, mix forward and reverse charged products, or combine invoiced and declared traffic in one statement.

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Such a system typically needs to be integrated with billing systems and the General Ledger as well as CDR Reconciliation and CDR Archiving solutions and is also required to provide comprehensive reporting functions.

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The Solution

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Based on many years of knowledge and experience in wholesale interconnect business upport and financial systems, Axino Solutions has developed a comprehen-sive solution in close cooperation with Deutsche Telekom International Carrier Sales & Solutions (ICSS), that has successfully been deploying our software for more than a decade now.

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Being the central financial transaction repository, INVOICE-SHARK provides:

• Built-in workflow, covering import, validation, dispute management and payment clearance for incoming and outgoing invoices / declarations.

• Assisted import of detailed line items from (scanned) statement, verification of OCR results and flexibility with respect to statement layouts.

• Sophisticated and unique process to automatically group and match incoming statement lines with own cost/revenue expectations.

• Statement validation and classification of differences based on thresholds, high-lighting potential (non-)favourable disputes.

• Ready-to-send Dispute Letter generation by just one click.

• Full control over payments, even when Statements include multiple products (hubbing and bilateral) or multiple billing cycles.

• Documenting the negotiation procedures while solving disputes.

• Handling of incoming dispute letters, linking up to own statement lines.

• Dispute workflow with generation of correction notes and accounting records to GL.

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Technical and Operational

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INVOICE-SHARK is a multi-user web 2.0 application running on standard browser software. It has a client server architecture based on Intel hardware platform and utilizing Microsoft Windows, SQL Server and Internet Information Server system (IIS) software.

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INVOICE-SHARK integrates to existing MS Windows integrated security features. It has a role driven mechanism for management of users and rights. It has an open interface for easy integration to billing and CRM systems. It offers readymade modules to communicate with General Ledger systems such as SAP.