Billing Systems

Introduction

In the early part of 1998, Hammond Street Developments were approached by Alphalink Pty Ltd, with a request to create a management system that would assist them in controlling the billing of their members. On the first of April that year, the ISP Member Management System (mms) was released.

Over the last 5 year, MMS has evolved into a fully-fledged management system that completely encapsulated the billing and accounting requirements of Alphalink. The system includes:

A system for controlling the services that are provided to customers and the automated billing of those services.

A traffic accounting system (IPAS), which is used to monitor the Internet usage of various members.

A members web interface (E-Services)

An Internet based credit card gateway (HavEComm)

These core systems interact with each other to fully control all aspects of member management within the MMS system.

The HavEComm Credit Card Gateway (www.havecomm.com.au) is used by the system to process all credit card transactions. The system has been designed to accept credit card transaction requests via the Internet, and process them via the St George Bank. The system can handle credit card transactions requests from multiple clients (of which MMS is one), via a secured (HTTPS) URL.

Each HavEComm client is given a 128 Bit Client ID, which is used when making a transaction request. This Key is used by the HavEComm system to identify the client. The HavEComm will process the transaction on the client’s behalf, via an Argent link to the St George Bank, and return either a unique receipt number (positive number) upon success, or an error code (negative number) upon failure.

The HavEComm Gateway processes Credit Card transactions via the St George Bank. Each HavEComm client is required to obtain a Credit Card Merchant Number from St George.

Figure 10 illustrates the relationship between HavEComm, HavEComm clients, and the St Georges Bank

Clients

Case Studies