Telefakt in a nutshell
Telefakt is an application that manages; customers, orders, invoices and products. Each of these objects have several more sub-objects and underlying items but these are the primary ones. It manages your customers and their active services and handles invoicing of those services. The services can have complex billing mechanisms, like monthly fixed costs, usage billing, rating. The primary goal of any business is to make money, Telefakt handles billing in a transparent and predictable manner allowing our customers to better understand their earnings and predict coming changes.
Telefakt as a system consists of an Oracle database and a ColdFusion web-frontend, there is also a Windows application implemented in Delphi (Object Pascal) built as a back-office interface for Telefakt. This Windows application is considered legacy by us and is only receiving critical updates, we are working on moving all necessary functionality to the web application and that work is almost complete. Since that application is not in active development you won't find any documentation specific to that here.
Structure
Telefakt is customer centric, meaning everything is centered around customers. They are the core item in Telefakt and most objects are related to customers at one or more levels. In the diagram below we show how the most critical of these items are connected together via the customer.
When a customer orders a service an order is created on that customer. That order contains order-lines and those lines specify the service the customer is buying. The line defines which product is delivered, when it is delivered, when billing should start and when it should end, it defines the location, price and many other aspects - you can read more about orders and lines here
Once the service has been active for a while it is time to create invoices. Telefakt looks at the installed services of the customer and converts it into usages and invoiceplans. These usages and plans then get converted into invoices and invoice-lines, these are then converted into PDF's which can be sent to the customer. You can learn about how invoices are generated and works here.
After the invoice is sent debt-collection will start, this is normally handled by a partner system like Riverty, they receive all the customer payments, check them off against the correct invoice, apply any fees or interests and then pay the money on to GlobalConnect. Who sends the invoice depends on the customers invoice recipient settings, we currently support, email pdf, email excel, EHF, paper and EFaktura. The first two are done by Telefakt and the last three are done by our partners. You can read more about invoices here
After the first invoice Telefakt will continue to make invoices for the customers active services until they are no longer active. Services are deactived by ordering a Termination order (a type of change order) which deactives the lines by setting a stop date on the lines and changing the status. Once the stop date is reached and the termination of the service has been completed (actually terminating the service, like shutting down an internet connection is done in other systems) Telefakt will invoice the service to its defined stop date and then no more. This signifies the end of that service for the customer. If ther are no more services left on the customer we then consider that customer to be no longer active. They still remain in Telefakt as do all their orders and services but we don't invoice them anymore.
Next up: learning more about customers