To learn more about Tucows contact: Email: sales@tucows.com Web: platypus.tucows.com Phone: 1-800-371-6992 (toll free in North America) ext. 2020 96 Mowat Avenue Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3M1
The Platypus Billing System, developed by wholesale domain provider Tucows, is a leading recurring billing and subscriber management system designed to automate billing for Internet and application service providers and online merchants. Service providers choose Platypus to streamline billing data, in order to spend more time on what matters most – their businesses.
Product Highlights
Platypus is available with maintenance plans that include all future point release upgrades and access to Tucows’ industry-leading support team. The system can rate virtually any type of usage data and create clear, concise invoices. Platypus incorporates a “message wizard” that can be used to create automated mailings based on any customer characteristic. The billing system can send paper and email statements, charge credit cards and perform direct bank debits. Further, when a service is added to a customer account, Platypus will communicate with external systems to provision that service for the customer. Platypus can import customer, billing and usage data in many formats and can schedule batch operations on a recurring basis.
More Information
Ensuring accurate and timely billing of services is a complex process. Many homegrown accounting solutions based on spreadsheets or generic accounting software packages are unsuitable for the specialized needs of service providers. Without a professional billing system, service providers can lose money due to poor resource utilization, time and data-entry errors and unbilled or under-billed services.
The main objective of Platypus is to provide the service provider or merchant with flexibility. The system offers a wide range of fixed and variable rate setups, allowing for multi-tiered rate plans, weekday and weekend rates, discount periods, after-hours rates, and billing by time or by data usage. It also offers personalized support, a rating engine, a message wizard, statement creation, provisioning and scheduling.
“The purpose of Platypus is to be your back office,” says Bill Ford, director of billing solutions at Tucows. “The system is robust and can generate recurring invoices, recurring credit card payments and late notices, and automatically charge late fees.”
Platypus runs on Microsoft SQL Server and the Windows platform, and can easily communicate with many other servers, both UNIX- and Windows-based. Platypus can send commands to a variety of UNIX machines, including Solaris, FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, BSDI and others. Alternately, commands can be sent to ODBC interfaces, HTTP Web pages, as email messages or to command line interfaces. The system is designed to be both a comprehensive billing environment and a centralized customer management system.
“The traditional control panel simply allows users to manage accounts,” says Ford. “The Platypus system is designed to bill properly for new, emerging Internet products and services.” The system can centralize the sale of a variety of products and services, but extends to traditional hosting customer management. Each customer’s data is automatically integrated throughout a service provider’s servers, eliminating the need for repetitive data entry.
Platypus is so comprehensive, says Tucows, that it is possible to outsource the printout of account statements to Tucows itself. Monthly license fees start at $99 for the maintenance of 1,000 customer records.
