Meveo - an Open Source Billing Platform

MEVEO is a billing system for mediation, rating, invoicing, payment, dunning and composition.

MEVEO is adapted to the following situations :

•     Batch process of thousands of invoices per month (or much more)
•     Complex price plans, real time rating, re-rating
•     Automatic provisionning through API
•     multi-format CDRs
•     Pre/Post-Invoicing reports

MEVEO is not adapted for :

•     Invoicing you could do with excel : You need a server with jboss, and launch several standalone processes in order to produce even one invoice.
•     Order entry : The catalog  do not cover complexity of commercial offers, with incompatible services and options.
•     Selfcare : Dont think to give the GUI to your customers, it is for people that know what they do.

Main entities

Catalog:

•     Charges: One shot, recurring (and associated calendar)
•     Services: subscription charges, termination charges, recurring charges, associated to an invoice subcategory
•     Offers: List of services

Account Hierarchy :

•     Multi tenancy : All accounts (and other entities) are associated to a provider
•     Customer account :  account holding the balance and its operations (payments, invoices, refunds, etc.)
•     Billing account :  account holding the invoices and the transactions (through wallets), can be associated to a billing cycle
•     User Account : account holding the information of the user of the services
•     Subscription : entity holding instances of services and options, counters, access (that allow to route CDRs to account)

Invoices :

•     Categories and subcategories
•     Taxes (associated to an invoice subcategorie)
•     Invoicing calendars

AR :

•     Account operations

Dunning:

•     Dunning plans (steps, actions)

Composition:

•     Invoice and messages templates (electronic & paper)
•     Messages and campaigns
•     Communication policies (global and per account)

Features

Mediation : (Medina)

•     Multi-CDR transfer protocol (files, WS, DB, message queues, etc.)
•     Multi-CDR file format (csv, asn1, txt, etc.)
•     Deduplication
•     Zoning, Timing, Numbering plan
•     Rated and non-rated CDR management
•     Multi-EDR production protocol (files, WS, DB, message queues, etc.)

Rating : (Vertina)

•     Multi-EDR transfer protocol (files, WS, DB, message queues, etc.)
•     One shot, recurring & usage rating
•     In memory compiled price plan and charging plan with configuration loaded from DB
•     Ability to split charges on distinct subscriptions.
•     Arbitrary decimals calculations.
•     Ability to re-rate transactions (in case of mistake in price plans or subscription).
•     Ability to rate both with and without tax (for B2C and B2B)
•     Multi-transaction production protocol (files, WS, DB, message queues, etc.)
•     Multi-currency

Invoicing : (Oudaya)

•     Invoicing list of accounts or all accounts of a billing cycle
•     Pre & Post-Invoicing report (amount invoice, per customer category, per payment type, tax aggregates, etc.)
•     Transaction modifications in order for total price with tax to match sum of price with tax of transactions (B2C case)
•     Multi-language

Provisionning & charging : (MEVEO-Admin)

•     XML file and WS API for accounts, subscriptions and services provisioning
•     Batch for recurring charge applications according to charge calendar (in advance or after period)
•     Subscription and termination pro rata computation
•     Service & charge cancellation : ability to cancel all non invoiced transactions
•     Termination reason management : configuration of pro rata, reimbursement, contract duration charges depending on termination reasons

Account receivable and Dunning : (Bayad)

•     Automatic Direct Debit Payment (with bank files import)
•     Automatic Invoices<->payments matching
•     Configurable dunning transitions (X days after first unpaid invoice, customer category, amount due, etc.)
•     Configurable dunning actions (email, provisioning action, fee, etc.)

Composition : (Grieg)

•     HTML/Pdf Invoice production
•     HTML/Pdf dunning letters
•     Email and paper channels
•     Campaign management  

Reporting (uses Pentaho):

•     Sales & accounting reports
•     Mlti-format generation (pdf, xml, csv, html, etc.)
•     Scheduling
•     Easy deploy of any custom transformation ot report

Technical overview

MEVEO is coded in Java using JPA2 for persistence.
As most of MEVEO process rely on counting and aggregation, SQL database has been chosen over other kind of repository or Non SQL storage.
It has been deployed in production on Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

MEVEO-Admin is a JavaEE6 web-application.
The java applications are based on a generic batch processing framework.
This allow to concentrate development to the business domain and leave to the framework usual tasks of error handling, transaction, file and other format processing.
They can be deployed on several distinct servers and run simultaneously.
The load-balancing can be performed per provider, customer accounts, etc.

For more information you may visit our website at: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/meveo/wiki

Also feel free to send me an email at czetsuya@gmail.com.

CodeProject