Billing – the way you want it

Do you ever experience that moment when everyone is looking at you?

Here at VC Warehouse we have our own billing platform for our VoIP service and I thought I would tell you a little about how it came about.

Back in the day when we first talked about adding VoIP to our video conferencing portfolio we made a decision that we would go for low margins and high volume. Our pricing is not based on what we think we can get away with – that way we have price confidence in ourselves.

However, early on this strategy hit a little bump, 2 bumps actually. Firstly we didn’t really want to spend much of our hard earned profit on an expensive billing system and secondly we wanted the world…and so that moment came. After weeks of towing and fro-ing, silence filled the office and I realised that I was the focus of attention…

“Isn’t this something you could knock out, Verity?”

Well yes is might be but it certainly isn’t a matter of knocking it out, I explained, it is going to have some highly complex issues in it. Also, it’s been 20 years since I did it seriously!

No matter, I had clearly shown some kind of weakness and the job was mine!

In truth though, this is exactly the sort of job I like, making numbers do things. In another life I truly believe I could have been a proper geek!

Over a week or so it took shape and the beauty of doing things yourself is that you can make things happen and we now have a billing system that does what we want it to do and in it’s simplest form works out the bill but better than that, we can bill our customers however they like, as a group, by each office, by departments across offices etc.

And every month I get a little thrill as the “Create Invoice” button is clicked and the numbers are spat out in seconds – that is probably because I need a more exciting life!