Understanding Revenue Assurance Manager

About Revenue Assurance Manager

You use Revenue Assurance Manager to do the following:

Verify the end-to-end completeness, accuracy, and integrity of BRM revenue-related processes. See "About Collecting Revenue Assurance Data".
Collect revenue assurance data on write-offs. See "About Collecting Revenue Assurance Data on Write-Offs".
Send alerts when revenue assurance data passes a threshold that you set. For example, you can configure an alert to be sent when the number of suspended event records exceeds 100,000. See "About Revenue Assurance Alerts".

The data collected by Revenue Assurance Manager is stored in the BRM database. You analyze that data to find revenue leakage in your system. You can view the data by using Revenue Assurance Center or Revenue Assurance Manager reports. See "About Viewing Revenue Assurance Data".

About Collecting Revenue Assurance Data

You can collect revenue assurance data from the following BRM processes:

Regular billing:
- Billing accounts (pin_bill_accts utility)
- Collecting credit and debit card payments (pin_collect utility)
- Invoicing (pin_inv_accts utility)
- Deferring actions (pin_deferred_act utility)
- Calculating cycle fees (pin_cycle_fees utility)
Bill on purchase
Bill now
Auto-triggered billing
Trial billing (pin_trial_bill_accts utility)

To collect revenue assurance data from those processes, you must configure the related utilities and operations to generate that data. See "Configuring BRM to Generate Revenue Assurance Data for Billing".

Revenue assurance data consists of statistics such as the following:

Number of input records
Number of successful records
Number of failed records
Total revenue billed
Total revenue to be collected
Total revenue collected
Number of successfully billed accounts
Number of accounts that failed to be billed
The total revenue associated with successfully billed accounts
The number of suppressed bills
The revenue associated with suppressed bills

BRM stores revenue assurance data in /process_audit and /process_audit/billing objects in the BRM database.

After revenue assurance data has been collected, you can view the data by using Revenue Assurance Center or Revenue Assurance reports. See "About Viewing Revenue Assurance Data".

How Revenue Assurance Data Is Collected

Revenue Assurance Manager collects data from the following:

Bill on purchase, bill now, and auto-triggered billing operations.

Control points in utilities. The control points are preconfigured, and you cannot change them.

Table 1-1 lists the utility control points:

Table 1-1 Utility Control Points

Control Point	Utility
Revenue Anticipated	The pin_bill_accts utility that selects accounts ready for billing provides information on anticipated revenue.
Revenue Collected	The pin_collect utility that collects the balance due for bills paid by credit card or direct debit provides information on collected revenue.
Invoice Generated	The pin_inv_accts utility that creates a bill for the balance due provides information on the number of generated invoices, including total event records processed, event records successfully invoiced, and failed event records.
Scheduled Deferrals Executed	The pin_deferred_act utility that executes deferred actions calculates the number of executed scheduled deferrals.
Cycle Fees Generated	The pin_cycle_fees utility used to identify cycle forward fees that have reached the end of free billing periods calculates the number of generated cycle fees.

About Viewing Revenue Assurance Data

You can view revenue assurance data by using either of the following:

Revenue Assurance Manager reports: You can generate summary and detail reports from revenue assurance data. You can change the report parameters to meet your business needs.

See BRM Reports.
Revenue Assurance Center: You can use this application in Business Operations Center to search for and view revenue assurance statistics. See Revenue Assurance Center Help for detailed instructions about using the application.

See "Installing Revenue Assurance Center".

When you use Revenue Assurance Center to view revenue assurance data, you can search for data based on the following information:

Billing segments
Accounts billed on the same accounting day of month (DOM)
A combination of billing segment and DOM

You can display data from all or some of the control points listed in Table 1-1.

Note:

The data that can be displayed in Revenue Assurance Center is restricted as follows:

Revenue assurance data collected from trial billing is viewable only in reports.
Revenue Assurance Center can display only split revenue assurance data. See "About Splitting Revenue Assurance Data into Detailed Categories".

About Splitting Revenue Assurance Data into Detailed Categories

You can split revenue assurance data into detailed categories, such as amounts associated with A/R items, billable items, and suppressed bills. Splitting revenue assurance data enables you to pinpoint the source of revenue leakage in your system more accurately.

The following operations automatically generate split revenue assurance data:

Bill now
Bill on purchase
Auto-triggered billing

Note:

By default, generation of revenue assurance data by the preceding operations is disabled. To enable it, see "Enabling Billing Operations to Generate Revenue Assurance Data".

The following utilities have a -split parameter that you can use to separate revenue assurance data:

pin_bill_accts
pin_trial_bill_accts

Note:

If you intend to collect revenue assurance data from these utilities, be sure to use the -split parameter when you run them.

See the discussions on pin_bill_accts and pin_trial_bill_accts in BRM Configuring and Running Billing.

You can view split revenue assurance data in Revenue Assurance Center or in Revenue Assurance reports:

Revenue Assurance Center automatically displays split data. It cannot display data that is not split.

You can configure Revenue Assurance Reports to display split or unsplit data. See "About the Split Method Parameter" in BRM Reports.

About Split Revenue Assurance Data

Split revenue assurance data includes the following categories:

A/R items: If service types are associated with these items, the amount for each service type is also generated:
- Adjustments: Adjustment charges.
- Payments: Total number of payments received.
- Payment reversals: Total payment reversals.
- Disputes: Sum of disputed amounts.
- Settlements: Sum of settlements.
- Refunds: Total refunds.
- Write-offs: Total number of written-off accounts.
- Write-off reversals: Total number of reversed account write-offs.
Billable items: The billable items and their subtypes that you configured (for example, usage charges, recurring charges, one-time charges, and discounts).
Miscellaneous charges: If billable items are not configured, the split revenue assurance data is stored as miscellaneous charges.
Connections: The number of billed subscription devices or services.
Bills suppressed: The number of suppressed bills, the reason for the suppression, and the anticipated revenue.

Note:

The bills-suppressed data is generated by regular billing, trial billing, and auto-triggered billing only.

Splitting Revenue Assurance Data by Type of Charge

You can also split revenue assurance data by the type of charge, such as discounts and usage, one-time, and recurring charges. You do this by setting up custom billable items and item subtypes.

If you do not configure billable item subtypes, the split revenue assurance data is stored as miscellaneous charges.

See "Configuring Item Subtypes to Store Split Revenue Assurance Data".

About Collecting Revenue Assurance Data on Write-Offs

You can use Revenue Assurance Manager to collect statistics about the following types of write-offs:

Written-off accounts, bills, and bill items

This information is gathered from preconfigured utility control points and is displayed as A/R split revenue assurance data. See "About Splitting Revenue Assurance Data into Detailed Categories".
Written-off usage events

When a usage event is written off through Suspense Manager, an /event/notification/suspense/writeoff event is generated. You configure event notification so that Revenue Assurance Manager collects data every time such an event occurs. See "About Using Event Notification for Revenue Assurance".

The data collected from a written-off usage event includes the original batch ID and the number of event records that were written off in that batch of records.

See "Configuring BRM to Collect Revenue Assurance Data for Usage Write-Offs".

About Using Event Notification for Revenue Assurance

Revenue Assurance Manager uses event notification to collect data on written-off usage events.

The following events are generated specifically to facilitate the revenue assurance event notification process:

/event/notification/suspense/writeoff — When suspended usage event records are written off, Suspense Manager generates this event. By default, when this event occurs, the PCM_OP_PROCESS_AUDIT_CREATE_WRITEOFF_SUMMARY opcode is called.
/event/notification/ra_threshold — When specified conditions for producing revenue leakage alerts occur, the load_pin_config_ra_thresholds utility generates this event. By default, when this event occurs, the PCM_OP_PROCESS_AUDIT_POL_ALERT policy opcode is called. See "load_pin_config_ra_thresholds".

See "Configuring Event Notification for Revenue Assurance".