Unmatched Reliability | Usage-based Billing | Discounts & Promotions | CostGuard Core Billing | Billing on Behalf Of | Unbilled Usage Dashboard | Dynamic Rating | Direct Invoicing
Unmatched Reliability
Peace of Mind in the Back-Office
A reliable billing system means having a reliable cash flow. IDI understands what consistent revenue means to your business, which is why one of our primary missions has always been to provide the most dependable and painless billing experiences in the telecom industry. With CostGuard, the process of generating and sending invoices is measured in hours, not days.
Fast, reliable and scalable:
- 25+ years of experience with over $1B annual billed revenue ensures that your billing will be accurate and on-time, every time
- IDI’s dedicated Billing Specialists work with your team to create a structured and hassle-free billing experience
- Flexible re-processing lets you fix issues found in your audits without jeopardizing your completion targets
- Cloud-based architecture supports on-demand scaling to meet the processing requirements of any size service provider
- IDI’s billing management dashboard, tailored for your company, ensures you have complete visibility and review of all processing that takes place
- SSAE 16 audited data center and operations
Usage-based Billing
Rate & Bill any Service, any Product, any Market
CostGuard’s powerful rating engine is the core of IDI’s end-to-end billing management system for telecom service providers. The ability to bill one-time, recurring, event, subscription or usage-based products and services across a wide variety of markets makes CostGuard the one billing system that will continue to support your business no matter where it grows.
Providing the industry’s most trusted billing platform:
- Comprehensive rating, taxing and billing for resellers, wireless, data, VoIP, Cloud, Unified Communications, Managed Data Center, IoT and other service providers
- All the empowering tools needed to load new usage and then rate and invoice for new products and services on your own timelines
- Sophisticated and unmatched depth of options let you control exactly how individual products and services will rate, tax and bill
- CostGuard’s scalable, automated cloud-based billing architecture handles all your processing, making it completely transparent to your users and day-to-day operations
- Flexible and robust invoicing capabilities ensure that your bill looks exactly as you want it across all your markets
- Dynamic features like Price Matrix and Dynamic Charges enable you to offer price points that account for factors such as customer location, contract status, average or peak consumption or consumption of other related products and services
Discounts & Promotions
The Freedom to Offer any Pricing Plan that you Can Imagine
CostGuard’s service order management capabilities remove the limits from pricing models you can sell, ensuring the billing system is enhancing, rather than hindering, your ability to compete. CostGuard supports volume, loyalty and free monthly usage based discounts, providing endless possibilities.
Don’t let your discounting engine limit your creativity:
- Create constant amount, fixed rate, single tier, rolling tier, usage-based or percentage-based pricing discounts
- Build different combinations of usage, products and services to determine the discount’s size and type
- Set filters for usage properties such as call distance, originating location, terminating location, serving location or time of day
- Evaluate usage by number of records processed, minutes used, charges calculated or quantity utilized
- Include buckets of monthly usage, minutes or charges and let customers roll-over unused portions
- Select from multiple options for pooling and sharing discounts across services on an account
CostGuard Core Billing
Integrate IDI’s Powerful Usage Billing Platform into your Existing CRM, OSS or Subscription Billing System
CostGuard’s Core Billing engine gives you the ability to solve chronic billing issues without disrupting the existing systems you have in place. Robust integration options and decades of experience make CostGuard the low-risk solution for getting your revenue stream on the right track.
Our proven rating, taxing and billing solution ensures accurate, on-time results:
- Seamless integration with your existing systems to feed customer and usage information in, and billing and taxation records out
- Professional Services consultants with a proven record of successful billing system integration projects
- Transparent billing operations with usage dashboards, tax audits and system logs
Billing on Behalf of
Billing Services for all your Resellers out of a Single System
Grow your revenue by providing white-label billing services to meet your individual channel partners’ needs, without needing a separate system. Your resellers will have the freedom to design, price and brand products and services in a way that defines them. You will have the visibility to track your costs and your margins to ensure you are maximizing these relationships.
The flexibility you need for all your resellers:
- Complete channel separation and segmentation within your existing system using CostGuard’s Market Management capabilities
- Invoice and customer portal branded to match your reseller’s organization
- Provide resellers with detailed information on end-customer consumption, their margins and what they owe you
- Track costs and margins on products, services and usage down to the individual end-customer level
Unbillable Usage Dashboard
Minimize Losses due to Unbillable Records
CostGuard’s Unbillable Usage Dashboard helps you capture revenue for every record – even if they could not be rated initially. The dashboard makes it easy to see the big picture of overall unbillable status, track trends and quickly spot upstream record issues. Jumping directly from the dashboard to the detailed record view lets you quickly correct errors and reprocess the usage in time for billing.
Gain the insight to avoid unbilled usage:
- Match unbillable record codes to specific root causes and their most common corrections
- Configure user-defined usage thresholds and validations down to the usage type and file type granularity
- Visualize unbillable activities to catch issues early on, or analyze historical unbillable trends
- Manually override validations and thresholds on a record by record basis
- Apply ad-hoc reporting capabilities to facilitate in-depth analysis and assessment
- Submit fixed records for immediate re-processing and real-time feedback
Dynamic Rating
Eliminate Redundant SKUS with Pricing that Adapts Automation to your Customers
CostGuard’s Price Matrix and Dynamic Products allow providers to configure a single SKU in their Product Catalog that dynamically adjusts its month to month pricing based on customer location, contract status or consumption of associated products and services. This solution simplifies the creation and maintenance of your product catalog and reduces the confusion that comes when a system forces the exact same product or service to be represented repeatedly for each price point.
Dynamic Rating provides the ability to:
- Setup a Price Matrix for a product that automatically determines price based on the pricing zone selected for the customer or service
- Define zones to represent locations, underlying carriers, data centers or any other pricing segmentation in use
- Set pricing tiers based on length of contract selected and automatically adjust pricing upon expiration
- Offer cloud-based models that utilize Metered Usage records to determine monthly consumption of services
- Bill customer consumption based upon peak, average or percentile utilization
- Create products that evaluate a customer’s consumption of related products and services in order to determine monthly price
Direct Invoicing
Recoup revenue for the Sale of High Cost Items at the Time of Sale
With Direct Invoicing, you can bill to account for high cost items, such as one-time construction services or expensive equipment, at the time of sale and realize the revenue sooner than if you waited to invoice these items according to the customer’s bill cycle.
Direct Invoicing empowers you to:
- Manage standard and one-off invoicing in one common system and avoid issues related to maintaining two separate invoice formats, tracking revenue and order processing coordination
- Set up a default tax jurisdiction, Bill to Account (BTA) Debit and Credit Types, and Invoice Configuration
- Designate Direct Invoicing products in the Product Catalog and add them to an order in combination with standard invoicing items
- During order assembly, apply discounts and override the default tax jurisdiction if needed
- Bill to Account in CostGuard for Direct Invoicing products and subsequently send an invoice for the Direct Invoicing products outside the normal bill cycle