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Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

  • 1.  Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    Posted May 04, 2020 07:45
    Hi Colleagues,

    I have a doubt a on Account Management API.

    I wanted know the exact difference between Party Account(Billing Account , Settlement Account) and Financial Account so that I can able to map in  my existing API. Though I have gone through the document of Account Management API but still it's not much clear .

    Please help me out on the same.

    Thanks In Advance.

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    Akansha Agarwal

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  • 2.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted May 04, 2020 08:56
    Hi Akansha
    As you probably realize, Account is an abstract entity, with the following concrete specializations:
    • Financial Account - an account that has monetary balances, but does not deal with payments. Typical usage might be aggregation of other accounts for reporting or other purposes
    • Party Account - an account that has monetary balances and can deal with payments.
    • Billing Account - specialization of Party Account that is intended for accounts-receivable, i.e. manages the balances for customers (or other party types) that generally receive service from the service provider and pay in respect of these
    • Settlement Account - specialization of Party Account that is intended (I believe) for accounts-payable, i.e. manages the balances for suppliers (or other party types) that generally give service to the service provider and expect to be paid in respect of these
    Hope it helps

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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
    Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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  • 3.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 20, 2023 09:07

    Hello Jonathan,

    As part of Account, we may have information such as type of account(prepaid/postpaid), contact address, other customer/account demographics so which account or level can be used for such scenario which can be considered an equivalent of a CRM account. 



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    Ashish Sharma
    Bharti Airtel Ltd
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  • 4.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 20, 2023 10:08

    A CRM account is a customer from TMF Open API context. The term account is used in the Open API model exclusively for financial implications.



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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
    Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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  • 5.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 21, 2023 02:08

    Oks, but how we manage an account lifecycle(signifies relationship with service provider) as one customer can have many associations with a service provider which may have different contact(billing/installation/other)....where will a party account come in picture in such case?



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    Ashish Sharma
    Bharti Airtel Ltd
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  • 6.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 21, 2023 02:23

    A party account is still purely a financial entity, acting as a base class for Billing Account (representing accounts receivable by telco from customer) and Settlement Account (representing accounts payable by telco to supplier) and possibly also Partner Account (a new addition from ZTP).

    You'll have to explain what you mean by Account in your context, and why it is different from Customer.



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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
    Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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  • 7.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 21, 2023 02:41

    Oks, thanks Jonathan for prompt response.

    So i will explain at a high level as follows, 1 customer buys multiple services(together or over a period of time) from us say 1 Broadband, 2 Postpaid, 1 DTH(Satelite TV)

    so as per security regulation in India, we do  identity verification for connection where applicable, there can be additional indicators for example DTH is a prepaid service and remaining are postpaid.

    Address for each of these connection can be different or same.

    So as per Siebel CRM,  a customer account is created which stores customer demographics(basis his/her Identify proofs submitted), contact, additional characterstics as account type, type of customer such VIP customer etc, basis onboarding information for every connection.

    service and assets are also tagged to the account.



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    Ashish Sharma
    Bharti Airtel Ltd
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  • 8.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 21, 2023 03:25

    Hi Ashish,

    Even if you speak the same language there will be a lot of confusion when words are used with a different meaning in different contexts. TM Forum makes an effort to avoid this confusion by using the same word only with one meaning.

    There are several CRM softwares that use the word account or customer account for the entity that in the TM Forum is called Customer. The Customer entity can store the information you mention above. Have a look at TMF629 for this purpose.

    Don't try to use the Account Managment API for this type of information. As Jonathan already explained, the Account Management API should only be used for financial purposes only in your billing or general ledger applications. A BillingAccount is the accounts payable balance linked to a Customer, but it is clearly distinct from the Customer entity itself.

    Regards



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    Koen Peeters
    OryxGateway FZ LLC
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  • 9.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 21, 2023 04:21
    Edited by Ashish Sharma Jun 21, 2023 04:21

    Thanks Koen, but in such case we invoke "Create Customer" for each connection, we create a customer ID which stores all this information for that particular connection.

    Additionally there is a object "Account" part of 629 which if referred as "Party Account", what information shall this refer to?

    Additional information such as bill structure etc. will have to be invoked at the above account level?

    product offering will also be mapped at customer ID also?



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    Ashish Sharma
    Bharti Airtel Ltd
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  • 10.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 22, 2023 09:17

    As I already explained above, in TMF models (such as Open API) Account (abstract) and its concrete subclasses are purely financial. There is no relationship whatsoever to the colloquial term account that is used in some CRM systems. Koen explained the rationale for unifying language concepts.



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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
    Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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  • 11.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jun 29, 2023 08:33

    Hi Jonathan, 

    I have additional question regarding financial account. 

    "A FinancialAccount is part of the sub-ledger accounting that aggregates the amounts of one or more business partner and / or Customer accounts owned by a given party. It's an internal view of the CSP to manage incomes and outcomes. Each accounting event from a BusinessPartnerAccount or CustomerBillingAccount is logged to a FinancialAccount according to the assignment rules specified by BsuinessPartnerAccountAssignment and CustomerBillingAccountAssignment." 

    The above statement is from GB922 - Common. 

    Questions: 

    1. Is a financial account primarily associated with a customer's account, or does it represent a separate account maintained by the CSP (Customer Service Provider) for tracking their own general ledger and financial transactions?
    2. Is a financial account assigned to each customer with multiple billing accounts, or is it a one-to-one relationship where each billing account corresponds to one financial account?

    Thanks, 
    Marijana Gluvcanin



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    Marijana Gluvcanin
    LotusFlare
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  • 12.  RE: Difference between FInancial Account and Party Account

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Jul 02, 2023 01:31

    Hi Marijana

    I'm not a finance expert so I hesitate to give a definitive answer. I would say that the use of a financial account (FA) is according to the needs of the service provider and/or its customers, and of course subject to the underlying implementation of the billing and A/R system that is deployed. Assuming the FA is supported, then large customers could use it for aggregation (e.g. all branches of pizza franchise in a certain geographical area), or the service provider might want to use it for internal purposes.

    Hope it helps



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    Jonathan Goldberg
    Amdocs Management Limited
    Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
    ------------------------------