If you're a tier 1 carrier, you offer many services, some of them through partnerships. Software can check that everyone agrees on who's doing what, and when they get paid for it.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 6, 2007]

We first profiled the billing reconciliation software of Colchester, Vt.-based Vertek Corporation over a year ago (see Billions and Billions of Phone Bills). Now the company has produced a system that will help service providers track payments to partners and commissions to sales staff.

"Our goal is to help carriers understand what's going on with their partners," explains Al Brisard, Vertek vice president of marketing and business development. "When you bill for a service that's being fulfilled by someone else, there are data inconsistencies. One partner may say the number of subscribes is X while the other says it's Y. Vertek Partnership Assurance (VPA) brings it all together to assess the health of the partnership. We call it operationalizing the data."

A simple discrepancy occurs, for example, when a subscriber cancels service with the carrier. The partner may not know that the service was cancelled and may continue billing for it.

So is this a step up for the software, the Managed Financial Assurance Program (MFAP)? "Certain components are leveraged from other software," says Michael Haggerty, Vertek director of business assurance. "The platform is similar, although the data is different, from Financial Assurance."

Analyzing the data
This is much more than a record presentation platform. VPA pulls data points from billing systems of the telco and its partners, from CRM software, and from any other application that might have relevant data. It needs information from the contracts signed between a telco and its partners. It can incorporate data from disk or DVD and from conference calls. It checks that data from the partners matches the data of the telco.

The resulting reports track, for example, mismatches between billing records (see image below).

Other issues that VPA tracks include: revenue leakage, rate of revenue increase from a partnership, percent of goals achieved, rate of disputes or issues between a telco and its partner and the trend rate, and other complex business process issues.

Some reports have to be customized for a particular customer, says Brisard, but most can be standardized. For example, everyone conforms to GAAP accounting practices, and many of the other business rules apply to most customers.

ISPs have complained to ISP-Planet and at ISPCON about telco billing errors for years, but none have talked to me about partnership billing disputes. Is it a common problem? "A lot of companies try to solve this problem internally," says Brisard. "With VPA, they achieve results, a better experience and a lower cost."

Brisard adds that public companies find it very useful because they need to disclose accurate data and VPA helps them do so.

Pricing and availability
Vertek Partner Assurance is a hosted service available now from Vertek. Aimed at tier 1 and tier 2 carriers, pricing depends upon a large number of custom options and is not public.

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