Subscription billing on its cycle in the Telecom pack
How the Telecom pack keeps service subscriptions, bills them on their cycle in the third wave, posts service and once-off income apart, and runs reminders.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Telecoms businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
An internet or voice provider lives on recurring revenue, yet its billing often depends on someone remembering to raise an invoice for every subscriber each month. The subscription itself, which package, which add-ons, which billing date, lives in a spreadsheet or a provisioning system, and the invoices are typed from it by hand.
Achekam's Industry CRM includes a Telecommunications pack built for internet, voice and mobile providers and resellers. This article explains how its service subscriptions become invoices on their billing cycle, how the income from them reaches the right accounts, how customer reminders are controlled, and what a provider does in the meantime if it starts before every part is switched on.
Service subscriptions as records in the pack
The Telecom pack keeps three kinds of record: Service subscriptions, support Tickets, and Installation jobs with the equipment installed. The service subscription is the one billing depends on. It is the record of what each customer takes from you: the line, the package, any add-ons, and the dates that govern the contract.
Because subscriptions sit in the same place as the customer's tickets and installation jobs, the person answering a billing query can see the whole relationship: when the line was installed, which equipment went in, and whether there was an outage ticket last month that might explain a disputed invoice.
The pack provisions nothing on your network. Subscriptions record what you sell; switching a line on or off still happens in your own systems, and your staff keep the two in step.
Invoicing on the cycle in the third wave
Bookings, subscriptions and renewals, milestones and retentions, deferred revenue and donation receipts arrive with the Industry CRM's third wave. For a provider, the subscriptions part of that wave is what turns a service subscription into invoices on its billing cycle, instead of a person raising each one.
The invoices produced are ordinary Achekam invoices. Each takes the next number in your sequence when it is issued and posts to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT. From there, everything you already use applies: the PDF on your letterhead, e-mailing, and a pay link for each issued invoice so the subscriber can pay online on a page carrying your name and branding.
Set the cycle with care when you create each subscription. A subscription billed on the wrong day, or for the wrong package, will now be billed wrongly every cycle without anyone touching it. Make checking the subscription part of the sign-off on every new connection and every upgrade.
Monthly service and once-off items posting to their own accounts
Switching the pack on adds its revenue accounts to your chart of accounts and its starter items to your catalogue. The Telecom pack's starter catalogue lists monthly service, static IP, installation, activation and call-out items, posting to two revenue accounts: Service subscriptions (4460) and Installation fees (4470). No starter item carries a price: you set your own.
Invoice lines in the Industry CRM name the revenue account and the product they sell, so revenue is posted account by account. For a provider, that means recurring service income and once-off installation income are separated as the invoice is issued, without a month-end reclassification. Your management accounts then show what recurring revenue really is, which is the number an investor or lender will ask for first. Recurring service versus once-off installation fees looks at that split in detail.
Subscription terms that bind you as a provider are not only commercial. In South Africa, ICASA's consumer protection regulations, including the End-User and Subscriber Service Charter, apply to telecoms and internet providers. Check your billing terms against your regulator's rules before you put every subscriber on an automatic cycle.
Customer reminders that stay off until an administrator switches them on
The third wave also brings customer reminders. Each planned customer reminder stays off until a workspace administrator switches it on, is sent at most once, and is limited by a daily cap. Reminders go by e-mail and in-app only, with no SMS or WhatsApp.
That default protects your subscribers from surprise messages while you are still setting up. Decide with whoever runs customer service which reminders to switch on, and in what order. Staff reminders for contract ends and SLA due dates are covered in reminders before contracts end and SLAs fall due.
Until then: the monthly invoicing routine
Without the third wave, a business cannot set up a recurring invoice for a customer; repeating invoices exist only as retainers created from a signed engagement letter. A provider that adopts the pack before every wave is switched on keeps invoicing by hand: a draft per subscriber each month, checked against the active list, issued and sent with pay links.
Monthly invoices for subscribers without recurring billing sets out that routine step by step. The subscriber list you keep for it is exactly the information you will need to create service subscriptions in the pack, so it is worth keeping it tidy now.
Preparing your subscriber base
Before switching billing to the cycle, clean the source: one row per active subscription, with the customer, the package, any add-ons, the billing date and the contract dates. Price the starter items to match your current packages. Then create the subscriptions, check a sample of the first cycle's invoices against what you billed by hand the month before, and only then let the cycle run unattended. Finally, name one person who approves every change to a package or billing date after launch; a cycle is only as reliable as the records it reads.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
