Business Central for Telecoms
Your billing competency is your biggest risk. Your revenue leakage goes undetected because your billing system and your accounting system are separate, and the gap between them is where margin disappears. Business Central, configured by Tres Tria, eliminates the divide between billing and accounting, bringing everything into a single platform at a fraction of the cost of legacy telecoms billing systems.
Why traditional billing systems are failing telecoms providers
Your services have evolved from simple voice to complex bundles of voice, data, connectivity, cloud and managed IT, but your billing platform has not kept pace. The complexity you are managing today is beyond what most traditional telecoms billing systems were designed to handle, and generic ERP systems cannot address it without significant customisation.
The result is a fragmented technology landscape. Your billing system generates customer invoices, your accounting system handles financial reporting, your contract management lives in spreadsheets and your revenue assurance is a manual exercise. Each system contains a partial view of your business. None provides the complete picture. Data moves between systems through manual exports, CSV uploads and copy-and-paste operations. Every manual touchpoint introduces the risk of error, delay and revenue leakage.
Revenue leakage is perhaps the most insidious problem. When services are provisioned in one system but billed from another, there is always a gap. Services that are active but not billed, contracts that have been renewed at different rates but the billing system has not been updated, usage charges that are consumed but never rated. This is not a theoretical risk. It is real revenue that is being delivered but not collected.
Business Central, configured specifically for telecoms by Tres Tria, addresses this challenge by bringing billing and accounting together in a single platform. When every service, every contract and every charge exists in the same system that produces your financial statements, the opportunity for leakage is dramatically reduced.
Revenue Leakage
Services provisioned but never billed, contract rate changes not reflected in invoicing, usage charges not rated correctly. When billing and accounting are in separate systems, leakage is inevitable.
Billing Complexity
Recurring charges, usage-based charges, one-off installations, minimum term commitments, bundle discounts and contract penalties. Managing this across separate systems creates errors and delays.
Month-End Reconciliation
When billing data and financial data live in different systems, month-end becomes an exercise in reconciliation rather than analysis. Finance teams spend days matching numbers rather than providing insight.
Contract Visibility
Minimum terms, auto-renewals, notice periods and early termination charges spread across spreadsheets and disconnected systems. No single view of contract exposure or renewal pipeline.
Automated line rental and service billing
The majority of telecoms revenue is recurring. Line rentals, broadband subscriptions, hosted telephony seats, SIP trunks, connectivity circuits and managed service fees all generate monthly or quarterly charges that need to be invoiced consistently, accurately and on time.
Astral Recurring Invoices, our AppSource extension for Business Central, automates this entire process. Recurring billing templates define the services, quantities, prices and billing frequency for each customer. At the scheduled billing date, the system generates draft invoices for review or posts them automatically, depending on your confidence level and process requirements.
Price increases can be applied across the customer base or to specific service types. Contract-specific pricing overrides ensure that negotiated rates are honoured for the duration of the agreement. When a contract reaches its renewal point, the system can apply new pricing automatically or flag the account for commercial review.
The volume of recurring invoices in a telecoms business makes manual billing impractical. A provider with one thousand customers, each receiving a monthly invoice with multiple service lines, generates twelve thousand invoices per year. Astral Recurring Invoices handles this volume without additional headcount, and every invoice is posted directly to the general ledger as it is created.
Recurring Revenue Components
| Service Type | Billing Approach |
|---|---|
| Line Rentals | Monthly recurring charge per line, with quantity adjustments as lines are added or removed |
| Broadband | Monthly subscription based on bandwidth tier, with contract-specific pricing |
| Hosted Telephony | Per-seat monthly charge with optional add-on features billed separately |
| Connectivity | Monthly circuit charge, often with stepped pricing based on committed bandwidth |
| Managed Services | Monthly retainer for ongoing service delivery, with scope-based pricing tiers |
Call detail record processing and usage-based charging
Beyond recurring charges, telecoms providers bill for usage. Voice calls, data consumption, international calls, premium rate numbers and out-of-bundle charges all generate revenue that needs to be captured, rated and invoiced accurately.
Call Detail Records (CDRs) from your carrier or switch are imported into Business Central, where they are rated against the customer's tariff structure. The rating process applies the correct per-minute or per-call charge based on the destination, time of day, call type and any bundle allowances. Rated calls are then consolidated onto the customer's monthly invoice alongside their recurring charges.
Bundle allowances add another layer of complexity. A customer might have an inclusive call package that covers a certain number of minutes to UK landlines and mobiles. Calls within the bundle are zero-rated, while calls exceeding the allowance are charged at the out-of-bundle rate. The rating engine handles this calculation automatically, applying the correct charge based on the customer's consumption against their allowance.
For providers who also sell data services, the same rating approach applies to data usage. Consumption records are imported, rated against the customer's data tariff and invoiced alongside voice and recurring charges. The result is a single, comprehensive invoice that covers all services.
Common Challenge
"Our call rating takes three days each month and we always find errors." Business Central's CDR import and rating process is automated and auditable. Rated calls are checked against tariff tables with full traceability from the raw CDR to the invoice line.
Common Challenge
"We cannot accurately track bundle usage across our customer base." The rating engine tracks consumption against bundle allowances per customer, per billing period, automatically applying out-of-bundle rates when allowances are exceeded.
Common Challenge
"Our customers query their bills and we struggle to provide call-level detail." Every rated call is stored in Business Central with full detail. Customer queries can be answered by looking up the specific call, its duration, destination and the tariff that was applied.
Minimum terms, renewals and early termination
Telecoms contracts are commercially binding agreements that directly affect revenue recognition, customer retention and financial forecasting. A typical telecoms customer might have multiple contracts covering different services, each with its own start date, minimum term, renewal terms and early termination provisions.
Business Central tracks contract details at the service level. Each service line has its own contract start date, minimum term duration, notice period and early termination charge calculation. The system alerts account managers when contracts are approaching renewal, enabling proactive customer engagement rather than reactive retention.
Early termination calculations are automated based on the remaining contract term and the agreed termination charge formula. When a customer requests cancellation, the system calculates the termination charge immediately, supporting informed commercial decisions about whether to enforce the charge or negotiate a retention offer.
Contract pipeline reporting shows the value of contracts coming up for renewal in each future period. This provides commercial teams with a forward-looking view of retention risk and renewal opportunity, enabling targeted account management activity.
Contract Lifecycle in Business Central
Provisioning
New service is set up with contract terms, minimum term and pricing agreed with the customer.
Active Billing
Recurring charges are generated automatically each billing period for the duration of the contract.
Renewal Alert
System alerts are triggered before minimum term expiry, prompting proactive account management.
Renewal or Termination
Contract is renewed with updated terms or terminated with automatic calculation of any early termination charges.
Identifying and eliminating billing leakage
Revenue assurance is the process of verifying that every service you deliver is being billed correctly. In telecoms, where billing complexity is high and service inventories are large, revenue leakage is not a possibility. It is a certainty. The question is not whether you are losing revenue but how much.
When billing and accounting exist in the same platform, every service, every contract and every charge is visible in a single system. Business Central enables you to compare active services against billing records, flag discrepancies and resolve them before they become entrenched. Common findings include services that were provisioned but never set up for billing, customers on legacy tariffs that should have been migrated, and contracted rate changes that were agreed but not applied.
Direct debit collection with GoCardless
Telecoms providers with large customer bases need efficient, automated payment collection. Astral GoCardless, our AppSource extension for Business Central, integrates GoCardless Direct Debit collection directly into your ERP. When invoices are posted, payment collection can be initiated automatically without leaving Business Central.
Direct Debit mandates are managed within Business Central. New customers can be set up with a GoCardless mandate during onboarding, and subsequent payments are collected automatically on the scheduled date. Successful payments are matched against the corresponding invoices, and failed payments are flagged for follow-up.
For telecoms providers, where the volume of monthly invoices is high and margins are tight, the reduction in manual payment processing and debtor chasing is significant. Debtor days typically reduce by 40% or more when Direct Debit collection is implemented across the customer base.
Common Challenge
"We spend two days a month chasing payments from customers who should be on Direct Debit." Astral GoCardless automates collection from within Business Central. Payments are collected on schedule and matched against invoices without manual intervention.
Common Challenge
"Our debtor days are too high for a subscription business." Direct Debit collection through GoCardless typically reduces debtor days by 40% or more, improving cash flow predictability and reducing credit control workload.
Unified billing and accounting in one platform
The single most transformative aspect of running telecoms billing within Business Central is the elimination of the billing-to-accounting reconciliation. When your billing system and your accounting system are the same system, every invoice that is generated is simultaneously a general ledger transaction. There is no export, no import, no reconciliation. The numbers match because they are the same numbers.
This integration extends to every financial process. Customer payments collected through GoCardless or received by bank transfer are allocated against specific invoices. Revenue is recognised at the point of invoicing, with deferred revenue handling for advance billing scenarios. Cost of sales is tracked against revenue streams, enabling margin analysis by service type, customer and time period.
Management reporting draws on this unified data set to provide insights that were previously impossible to obtain without manual consolidation. Astral Reports provides template-based financial reports that combine billing data with operational metrics, giving management a complete view of business performance. Power BI dashboards provide real-time visualisation of key performance indicators (KPIs) including average revenue per user (ARPU), churn rate, margin by service and contract pipeline value.
Further Telecoms Configuration
For billing managers, finance directors and technical evaluators who want to understand the platform in more detail.
Call Detail Records are imported from carrier files in CSV or fixed-width format. The import process validates each record for completeness and correctness before rating. Invalid records are quarantined for manual review rather than silently discarded, ensuring that no billable usage is lost.
The rating engine applies tariff rules based on the calling number (to identify the customer), the called number (to determine the destination type), the call duration and the time of day. Tariff tables support tiered pricing, peak and off-peak rates, international destination bands and bundle allowance tracking. The entire rating process is auditable, with every rated call traceable back to the raw CDR and the tariff rule that was applied.
Business Central can be integrated with provisioning systems through the API layer, enabling a closed loop between service activation and billing setup. When a new service is provisioned, the corresponding billing record is created in Business Central automatically. When a service is ceased, the billing is stopped. This integration is critical for revenue assurance, as it ensures that every active service has a corresponding billing entry.
For providers who do not have automated provisioning, Business Central provides manual service management with validation rules that prevent common errors such as billing for ceased services or failing to bill for new ones.
Telecoms providers often bill in advance for recurring services. Business Central supports deferred revenue recognition where advance billing is initially posted to a balance sheet deferred revenue account and then released to the income statement over the service period. This ensures that revenue recognition complies with 15 and UK requirements.
Installation charges and connection fees that are spread over the contract term can also be handled through the deferral mechanism, ensuring that one-off charges are recognised over the period to which they relate rather than at the point of invoicing.
Telecoms providers incur wholesale costs from upstream carriers and network operators. These costs need to be matched against retail revenue to determine margin by service, by customer and by traffic type. Business Central captures wholesale cost data alongside retail billing data, enabling true margin analysis.
Carrier invoices can be validated against expected costs based on rated CDRs, identifying discrepancies between what the carrier charges and what the rating engine calculates. This carrier bill validation process has identified significant overcharges for our clients, where carriers have billed for services that were ceased or applied incorrect rates.
Telecoms providers with international operations face additional complexity around billing compliance, interconnect agreements and regulatory obligations that differ by territory. Tres Tria deploys a standardised Business Central configuration across territories with local adaptations, coordinating the entire multi-territory rollout from a single project management structure.
Key capabilities for international telecoms include:
- Multi-country billing engines – each territory entity runs its own billing configuration with local tariff structures, tax rules and invoicing formats while sharing a common billing methodology and reporting framework
- International interconnect – wholesale cost management and carrier reconciliation across multiple upstream providers in different territories, with consolidated margin analysis at the group level
- Regulatory compliance per territory – Ofcom in the UK, BNetzA in Germany, ComReg in Ireland and equivalent regulators in other jurisdictions each impose specific reporting and compliance obligations that are handled through territory-specific configurations
- Gulf and DACH telecoms operations – Tres Tria has delivered telecoms configurations across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, UAE and Saudi Arabia, with full local billing compliance and statutory reporting
Our Enterprise tier, starting at £50,000, is specifically designed for international telecoms operations with multi-territory billing requirements.
Why telecoms providers choose Tres Tria
Telecoms is not a sector where a generalist ERP partner can deliver a successful implementation. The billing complexity, the regulatory requirements and the operational tempo demand a partner who has done this before and understands the specific challenges of the UK telecoms market.
Tres Tria has been delivering Business Central to telecoms providers since 2004. We understand the billing models, the carrier relationships, the Ofcom regulatory landscape and the competitive pressures that define this industry. Our consultants speak telecoms. They understand CDRs, SIP trunks, , churn and revenue assurance without needing it explained.
- Telecoms-specific discovery workshops covering billing models, tariff structures and contract management
- CDR import and rating engine configuration tailored to your carrier data formats
- Revenue assurance configuration to identify and eliminate billing leakage
- Astral Recurring Invoices and Astral GoCardless available with every implementation
- Contract lifecycle management with automated renewal alerts and termination calculations
- Published starting price of £35,000 for telecoms implementations
- Support Minutes model with small changes potentially live within an hour
- Data migration expertise from legacy telecoms billing platforms
"We replaced a billing system that cost us sixty thousand pounds a year with Business Central and Astral Recurring Invoices. The billing is faster, more accurate and completely integrated with our accounts. The cost saving alone justified the switch."
Ready to Unify Billing and Accounting?
Speak with a Business Central specialist who understands telecoms. We will show you how to eliminate billing leakage, automate recurring invoicing and bring your billing and accounting together in one platform.