October 23, 2023

Online Business Technology

OBT provides customers the ability to outsource their IT infrastructure, and have hosted applications that can be accessed from any computer in the world (Desktop Anywhere).

Due to the many different systems used OBT needed a system built to allow it to bill customers that are provisioned in Cortex, helpdesk support charges in Auto Task, and ad-hoc once off charges.

In Summary

Customer

Online Business Technology

Industry

Billing Application

Business Problem

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Solution

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Outcome

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Background

Before the billing application was created, OBT manually invoiced their customers. This process took over 40 man hours per month and was very error prone.

CoSource was commissioned to build a billing system that integrated into Cortex and Auto Task. The system needed the ability to bill customers at different rates for each application, pro- rate charges based when a user was created or deleted, and generate both contractual and non- contractual invoices in pdf format.

Solution

A custom built application was developed in asp.net 3.5 over a three tier layered architecture. The application integrated into Cortex through a custom stored procedure that allowed for real time access to the Cortex database.

The application has the following functionality:

Set different pricing for each customer
Invoice departments within a single customer’s organisation (i.e Organisations that have offices in multiple countries or states)
Bill customers in advance & arrears.
Generate Ad-hoc invoices
Generate contractual invoices by integrating into Cortex.
Generate non-contractual invoices by integrating into AutoTask.
Exclude customers & users from being invoices.
Custom Reporting

Telerik Reports were used to build the layout of the invoices, and integrated into the Billing Database to produce invoices in pdf format.

Benefits

To generate invoices the process was taken from 40 man hours down to under 1 hour to generate invoices.
Reduced Errors in the invoices, more reliable than the old manual process.
Items that were previously not being billed captured resulting in greater revenue