Telnames Launches Innovative Publishing Platform for its wholesale channel with jBilling

Telnames

Company

Telnames

Industry

Limited Liability

Challenge

• Find a billing solution with a customizable user interface
• Accommodate specific billing requirements
• Find a scalable billing system that can handle company growth.

Solution

• jBilling 3

Results

• A billing solution that is aligned with company functional requirements
• A billing solution that allows for scalability as business grows
• Development of a flexible and user friendly interface

Telnames Launches Innovative Publishing Platform for its wholesale channel with jBilling

Based in London, United Kingdom, Telnames provides professionals and businesses with a simple, low-cost service to help with online discovery and promotion. Using the award-winning .tel domain, they provide customers with a simple and effective online presence that they can own and update.

Challenge

Telnames needed a billing engine to support the roll out of its services to the wholesale channel. As with any e-commerce based solution, a billing system was a critical requirement. “We were starting from scratch,” says Gareth Jehu, Telnames’s Operations Director. “Our challenge was to find a billing product where the customization and on-going maintenance cost was minimal.”
Finding the most cost effective billing solution wasn’t Telnames’s only problem. “We had a very specific process we wanted to follow,” Jehu says. “We were open to a lot of billing systems, as long as they were flexible enough to allow for customization to fit within that process.”

“We wanted to minimize the amount of customization work, which meant that we needed an off the shelf billing system that was a good match for our ‘specific functional requirements. In this regard, jBilling proved to be the best fit.”

Telnames needed a solution that could easily handle its different billing scenarios. “We needed to be able to bill customers in multiple currencies, produce consolidated invoices and transaction statements and handle multiple VAT scenarios,” says Jehu.
That wasn’t all Telnames was looking for. “We needed API integration with our own product provisioning system. We had to be able to set low watermark thresholds, and lock accounts if credit levels dropped below a certain amount,” Jehu continues. “Invoices needed to be produced in hard and soft copy, we needed to be able to private label, and export to a third party accounting system.”
With this long list of requirements in mind, Telnames began an in depth search to find the billing solution that was best suited to its unique needs.

Solution

After investigating many billing solutions, Telnames selected jBilling, an enterprise, open source billing solution that could be easily customized.
As Jehu points out, “jBilling’s extensibility allowed us to alter the user interface in a way that was specific to our requirements. For example, we changed the navigation tabs so that we have a ‘Renewals’ tab, which gives a wholesale provider a list of domain names and renewal dates,” he says. “We also added a notification at the top of the screen so that a customer always knows their current balance.”
Telnames took advantage of many features that jBilling offers straight out of the box. “There was no need to create and integrate with a separate portal,” Jehu says. “jBilling gave us the ability to allow the customer to login to our customized user interface. By using different permissions, we could also dictate what the customer could see and do in the system.”

“jBilling allowed us to create the wholesale system we wanted. From an end-user perspective, we were able to customize the customer’s view of jBilling so that they only see what they need to see.”

When it came to their specific requirements, Telnames once again used features that jBilling already offered. “We used jBilling’s pre-paid functionality to make sure that a customer’s account is in credit, in order for them to process billable transactions,” Jehu says. “If a customer makes a deposit of 200 dollars, and that payment is applied to their account, the sales invoice is automatically generated and available for them to download.”

Results

jBilling was easily customizable and had features that matched Telnames’s billing requirements. Due to this fact, Telnames found jBilling to be the perfect solution. “The user interface now matches our requirements,” says Jehu. “If we want to make any changes, we have the flexibility to do so at any time. As our company grows, the added benefit is that our billing solution is completely scalable.”

“jBilling’s team has a very good at understanding our requirements and recommending the best way to approach and deliver those requirements. I don’t think that we have ever come across something that we can’t do.”

Aside from being flexible and scalable, jBilling proved to be the best fit for what was needed in other ways as well. “We didn’t want to invest heavily in an enterprise billing engine. It would have been overkill for the stage of evolution that the business is at,” says Jehu. “Using jBilling, we managed to create the working model we wanted without carrying any massive overhead cost.”




“The bottom line was that we needed a billing system that could control all the finances associated with the sale of the product and the customer’s compounds. jBilling not only gave us the flexibility to achieve this goal, but also provided us with the features that we required, in a way that met our requirements and budget.”