An automated system and method for consolidating a plurality of individual company charges for a customer with different periodic company billing and payment due dates is provided. Under the system, companies and businesses such as utility companies report their periodic billing information to a central processing office or facility. This is completed by electronic or magnetic data transfer. The processing office undergoes minimization processing and holds the billing information data in time su...

An apparatus for analyzing telephone billing data to produce augmented billings and reports on calls to classes of telephone numbers selected by the user, such as to calls not on a list of authorized telephone numbers or calls not fulfilling some other predetermined criterion, includes data reading, selecting, and storing means capable of obtaining telephone directory and billing data in machine manipulatable form, comparing means for finding matches between sets of data as well as tracking fail...

A billing system for on-line computer networks is disclosed. Customers of the on-line system are billed in their own currency for billable events which are generated. Billable events can include access to premium services, file downloads or gateway connections to other systems. Real-time processing of billable events allows the system to post charges to a customer's on-line charge statement quickly following generation of the billable event.

A method and system in which calls made on two or more phone lines of a customer are aggregated for billing and discount billing plans to which the customer subscribes are applied to the aggregated phone usage of the customer. In order to price a call made over a network by a customer of the network, information specifying a billing plan of the customer and information specifying a plurality of telephone lines to which the billing plan applies are stored. A call made from one of the plurality of...

The present invention is directed to a method for placing a call between a client in one network and a client in another network. The IP network includes a SIP server and a network gateway configured to provide access to a public switched network. The method includes receiving a SIP call request message from the first client. The SIP call request message is authenticated to thereby identify an authentic originating client. Subsequently, a database is searched to find client billing tag correspon...

Access devices using billing agents and methods are disclosed. In one embodiment, the method comprises capturing, at an access device, a communication to be transmitted from the access device. The method further comprises determining billing information about the communication and transmitting, from the wireless communications device, the billing information to a billing system.

Wireless internet services billing enables a telecommunications company to bill internet service events on a transaction level. In a described implementation, an internet service event, which occurs at least partially within an internet environment, is detected. An internet services proxy injects event billing information related to the detached event into an event billing information communication that is sent to a telecommunications billing gateway. At the telecommunications billing gateway, t...

This invention has as its object to allow a print system having a middle insert print function to insert an index sheet without billing for it. According to a preferred embodiment, when it is set to insert an index sheet, a print application (305) executes a non-billing command transmission preparation process (step S603). Upon completion of the preparation process, the print application transmits a non-billing command to a printer (step S604). The print application then executes an index sheet ...

The present invention provides a paperless billing process for enabling expedited and simplified payments of print volume bills by customers of printing systems. A method of performing a billing process for the copies or prints produced by customer of a printing system is provided where the printing system comprises a memory that stores product usage data indicating a measurement of the actual use of the printing system. The printing system first accesses the memory to retrieve the product usage...

A content billing method for performing billing processing corresponding to use of digital content. After the operation is started, search management processing is performed. In the search management processing, information on whether or not a search period expires is managed. When the search period expires, content is searched for in automatic-search-and-collection processing, and identification information of the content is extracted and use information is generated in identification-informati...