We rate usage as it happens, apply telecom tax at the line-item level in every US jurisdiction you bill into, and issue invoices under your brand — not ours.
| Recurring | |
| Hosted PBX — Pro seat42 × 24.99 · 3 prorated | 1,049.58 |
| SIP trunk channels20 × 19.00 | 380.00 |
| Contact center agent6 × 89.00 | 534.00 |
| Handset rental42 × 5.00 | 210.00 |
| Usage — rated to 14:22:07 CDT | |
| Toll-free inbound11,204 min · tiered | 246.49 |
| SMS / MMS8,912 msgs | 71.30 |
| Taxes, fees & surcharges | |
| Federal USFinterstate portion · safe harbor | 131.44 |
| TX state & Dallas local sales tax6.25% + 2.00% | 205.55 |
| 911 service fee & equalization42 lines | 21.25 |
| TX USF & federal regulatoryassessed on intrastate | 54.53 |
| Balance due | 2,904.14 |
Most providers still rate in batch. Usage sits in CDR tables until the cycle closes, gets rated against whatever rate plan happened to be attached at the time, and lands on an invoice three days later. By then a customer has burned through a fraud event, a rate plan has been out of date for five weeks, and the account that looked profitable has been carrying an unbilled trunk since March.
Nobody notices, because the only way to notice is to reconcile — and reconciling a month of usage by hand is a week of work that nobody has.
Taxation is the second half of the problem, and it is worse. Communications is among the most heavily taxed industries in the country: federal USF contributions, FCC regulatory fees, E911 and 988 surcharges, state utility and sales taxes, and district-level levies that change quarterly across more than thirteen thousand jurisdictions.
Getting it wrong is expensive in both directions. Over-collect and you are holding money that is not yours while your quotes lose to competitors. Under-collect and the liability is still yours — states routinely assess back taxes, interest and penalties against the provider, not the subscriber, and VoIP enforcement has tightened materially in the last three years.
The providers who handle this well are running enterprise BSS platforms priced for carriers. Everyone else is running spreadsheets and hoping.
A complete billing stack that sits between your switch and your customer. You keep the network. We take the meter, the tax engine, the invoice and the receivable.
Usage events stream in as they are written and are rated in under a second against the customer's current plan — tiered, bundled, committed, or per-route. Balances, prepaid drawdown, spend alerts and hard caps operate on live figures, so a fraud event trips at the threshold instead of at the cycle close.
Every charge is classified, sourced to a jurisdiction, and taxed on its own terms — because a handset rental, a broadband circuit and an interstate minute are three different tax animals. Interstate/intrastate allocation runs on safe harbor or your own traffic study.
Invoice generation and delivery, card and ACH autopay through tokenizing processors, retry and dunning ladders, late fees, credits, adjustments and disputes — with a customer-facing portal for statements, usage detail and payment methods.
Multi-tier structures where your resellers bill their own customers under their own brand, on their own rate tables, with commissions and margin calculated at each level and settled automatically.
Continuous reconciliation between what is provisioned on the switch and what is billed on the invoice. Unrated usage, orphaned services, negative-margin routes and accounts drifting below cost get surfaced as exceptions — not discovered in an annual review.
Optional. Our team runs the cycle, the exception queue, the dunning calls and the billing support desk under your name and your email domain. Available on the Operator tier.
Every line below rates and taxes differently. All of them land on one invoice, in one cycle, with one payment.
| Service | Rating model | Tax treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Hosted PBX seats | Per seat, recurring, prorated on add and remove | Telecom service; USF on interstate portion |
| SIP trunking | Per channel, with burst and per-minute overage | Telecom; interstate/intrastate allocation applies |
| DIDs & toll-free | Per number, recurring, plus porting NRC | Telecom; per-line E911 and 988 surcharges |
| Inbound & outbound usage | Per minute, per route, tiered or bundled | Jurisdiction from originating and terminating NPA-NXX |
| SMS, MMS & 10DLC | Per message, plus brand and campaign fees | State-dependent; carrier pass-through fees itemized |
| Contact center | Per named or concurrent agent, plus usage | Split treatment: telecom transport vs. software |
| Microsoft Teams voice | Per user, per DID, per calling plan | Telecom; bundled-rate unbundling where required |
| Handsets & devices | Recurring rental or one-time sale | Sales tax; rental treated as lease in most states |
| Broadband & SD-WAN | Per circuit, recurring, with install NRC | Internet access generally exempt under ITFA1 |
| Managed IT & MSP | Per endpoint, per user, or flat retainer | Generally non-telecom; sourced to service address |
| Cloud & SaaS licenses | Per license pass-through, with margin | Generally non-telecom; state-dependent on SaaS |
| Professional services | One-time, milestone, or time and materials | Generally non-telecom; labor rules vary by state |
1 Internet Tax Freedom Act. Exemption applies to internet access charges but not to bundled telecom components — which is exactly why bundles need to be unbundled at the line-item level rather than taxed as a blob.
No rip and replace, no export-and-reimport, no changes to your dial plan or your switch configuration. We connect, we read, we rate, we post back.
Your switch ──event stream──▶ Mediation ──▶ Rating ──▶ Tax ──▶ Invoice ──▶ AR
▲ (API / CDR polling fallback) │
└──────────── payments · credits · balance adjustments ───────────────────────────────┘
round trip typically under one second
We consume call detail and provisioning events as they are written, with API or file-drop polling as a fallback so a dropped connection backfills instead of losing a day. Push or pull — whichever your platform supports.
Your products, add-ons, volume discounts and promotional plans map to billable, taxable line items — including the bundles, which get decomposed so each component is taxed correctly.
Payments, credits and adjustments post back to your system of record, so customer balances agree everywhere continuously rather than at reconciliation time.
Commercial softswitches, open-source stacks and homegrown platforms all connect the same way — through our ingest API, an event subscription, or a plain CDR drop. If it produces usage records, we can rate them.
Below is a real breakdown structure for a single Dallas, Texas account — the kind of detail that has to be defensible when a state auditor asks how you arrived at it.
| Imposition | Basis | Rate | Assessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Federal Universal Service Fund | Interstate revenue, safe-harbor allocation | contribution factor | 131.44 |
| FCC regulatory fee | Interstate & international revenue | per FCC order | 9.87 |
| Texas state sales tax | Taxable telecom & tangible rental | 6.250% | 155.71 |
| Dallas local sales tax | Sourced to service address | 2.000% | 49.84 |
| Texas Universal Service Fund | Intrastate telecom revenue | 3.300% | 44.66 |
| 911 service fee | Per line, per month | 0.50 / line | 21.00 |
| 911 equalization surcharge | Per line, per month | 0.006 / line | 0.25 |
| Federal excise tax | Local service only | 3.000% | — |
2 Illustrative structure using a representative account. Rates, contribution factors and surcharges change quarterly; our tax content is updated monthly from certified rate sources and versioned, so any historical invoice can be recomputed exactly as it was originally assessed.
Interstate/intrastate allocation drives USF exposure more than any other input. Run the FCC safe-harbor percentage, or feed us your own traffic study and we will apply it consistently and keep the working papers that justify it.
Capture, store, validate and expire resale, government, non-profit and enterprise certificates — applied automatically at rating time, flagged for renewal before they lapse rather than after an auditor finds them.
Jurisdiction-level liability reports formatted for your filing provider or your compliance team, reconciled to the cent against what was actually invoiced and collected. If you would rather not file at all, we will coordinate with a filing partner and close the loop.
We will tell you where your customer footprint has created a filing obligation you have not registered for. Finding that out from us is considerably cheaper than finding out from the state.
Custom domains, invoice templates, notification email from your domain, and your descriptor on the customer's card statement. One platform underneath, three separate brands on top — and none of them are us.
Bills 4,200 seats direct. Invoices from billing.northwind.com, statement descriptor NORTHWIND COMM.
Reseller. Own rate table, own margin, own logo on every invoice. Never sees your cost basis.
End customer. Logs into Cascade's portal, pays Cascade, and has no idea either of us exist.
We do not take a percentage of what you bill — that would make our incentives and your growth adversaries. You pay for active billed subscribers, and everything in your tier is included.
Launch $1.25 / sub / mo $500 monthly minimum |
Scale $0.95 / sub / mo $2,000 monthly minimum |
Operator Custom 50,000+ subscribers |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Core | |||
| Real-time mediation & rating | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Line-item US telecom taxation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Switch & BSS integration | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Invoicing, card & ACH autopay | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Customer self-service portal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Brand & channel | |||
| Custom domain & invoice templates | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Your statement descriptor | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reseller & agent hierarchies | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Commission & margin settlement | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Operations | |||
| Dunning & collections workflows | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Revenue assurance exceptions | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Exemption certificate management | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Managed billing operations desk | — | — | ✓ |
| Tax filing partner coordination | — | — | ✓ |
| Support | |||
| Support | Priority + Slack | Dedicated engineer | |
| Uptime SLA | — | 99.9% | Negotiated |
| Talk to us | Talk to us | Talk to us | |
Implementation is quoted separately and typically runs $2,500 to $25,000 depending on catalog complexity and the state of your existing data. Card processing is passed through at cost plus a disclosed margin; we will show you the basis points before you sign anything.
Give us read-only access. We bill a full cycle alongside your existing process and hand you a line-by-line variance report: what you under-billed, what you over-taxed, what was provisioned and never invoiced. Nothing cuts over, nothing changes, no customer sees anything. If the variance does not justify the switch, you have a free audit and we shake hands.
Read-only. No switch changes.
Be honest about the spreadsheets — everyone has them. We would rather come to the call with answers than slides.