Specialist Commercial Wholesale Billing at Cell C

Job Purpose

• The Specialist: Commercial Wholesale Billing is responsible for ensuring accurate, compliant, and dispute-free billing for all MVNE/O partners through effective oversight of the end-to-end billing cycle.
• The role validates monthly invoices, investigates and resolves billing discrepancies, manages credit notes, rebates, and billing adjustments, and ensures the integrity of all transactional, contractual, and usage data that informs billing outcomes.
• The role provides analytical, technical, and commercial support by extracting and interpreting data, assessing billing and revenue assurance risks, recommending and implementing process improvements, and supporting the design of new promotional, pricing, or commercial structures to ensure operational readiness and billing accuracy.
• The incumbent is also accountable for delivering billing-related reporting, maintaining billing controls, and supporting the consistent application of commercial agreements, business rules, and governance requirements.
• This role requires sound commercial acumen, strong analytical capability, and the ability to engage effectively with internal and external stakeholders to safeguard revenue, strengthen partner confidence, and support efficient billing operations.

Main Responsibilities

Technical and Analytical Support

• Review, analyse and evaluate all the capabilities of the Cell C Wholesale Billing platform and all billing process per business model type (MVNE/O’s) and recommend improvements.
• Review, analyse and develop insights that all data sources used by the Network Core charging systems for invoicing, CDR structures and streams are charged correctly
• Review the monthly invoice process and design new process where applicable for new services (such as IoT, premium services, API billing, etc.)
• Analyse all aggregate data tables (single view of customer) and develop insights to ensure the availability of API revenue opportunities
• Review, analyse and evaluate all the onboarding data BRS documents and update if required.
• Review, analyse and evaluate the workings and systems of the interconnect area, carrier services area and the international roaming area.
• Identify potential financial risks and exposures and advise management of financial implications as well as implement controls to prevent losses.
• Analyse, understand and evaluate all MVNE/O Partner agreements (including limited duration promo letters), MPC structures and Voucher agreements and ensure that all billing as per the commercial agreements are correct
• Extract, compile, and analyse billing, usage, and commercial data to support invoice validation, discrepancy resolution, and decision-making.
• Translate complex billing data into meaningful insights for finance, commercial, and operational stakeholders.
• Use analytical tools and billing system outputs to identify trends, anomalies, leakage risks, and improvement opportunities.
• Support technical interpretation of billing system logic, configurations, rating tables, and commercial structures where required.

End-to-End Commercial Billing Management

• Oversee and coordinate the end-to-end billing process for all MVNE/O partners to ensure invoices are produced accurately, completely, and within agreed timelines
• Validate billing inputs from multiple data sources, including transactional, usage, rating, pricing, rebate, and contractual data
• Review monthly billing runs to confirm alignment with contractual agreements, approved rate structures, promotions, discounts, rebates, and commercial terms
• Ensure billing outputs are accurate, auditable, and supported by appropriate reconciliations and validations
• Monitor billing cycle adherence and proactively identify risks that may impact invoice quality, timeliness, or partner satisfaction
• Manage the end-to-end process for billing adjustments, including credit notes, debit notes, rebates, and commercial settlements, ensuring approvals and supporting documentation are in place
• Validate the legitimacy, accuracy, and financial impact of all proposed billing adjustments before all proposed billing adjustments before processing
• Ensure rebates and retrospective commercial adjustments are applied correctly and in line with approved commercial terms
• Maintain clear audit trails and documentation for all credits, rebates, and invoice amendments
• Monitor adjustment patterns and escalate unusual volumes or trends that could indicate control weaknesses or contractual misalignment

Invoice Validation and Billing accuracy

• Ensure all invoices prepared by Finance and processed by CDrator and Data Warehouse for billing are correct to ensure accuracy and validity against all Commercial Agreements. Approve such invoices on behalf of Wholesale
• Review controls and existing processes to ensure all invoices are issued and are accurate. Evaluate and provide recommendations for changes
• Review and evaluate existing and/or new processes and advise and recommend changes required
• Investigate anomalies, variances, exceptions, or unexpected billing outcomes using available system data, contractual references, and billing logic
• Confirm that all recurring and non-recurring charges, revenue share calculations, usage charges, adjustments, and rebates are correctly applied
• Maintain strong controls over billing quality to reduce invoice disputes, revenue leakage, and rework
• Support the implementation of billing validation frameworks and checklists to improve first-time-right billing performance

Reporting and Governance

• Develop monthly management reports, distribute and present to Revenue assurance and Wholesale department
• Review monthly debtors ageing and ensure collections are handled as per legal agreements
• Review wholesale billing reports and ensure accurate invoicing of airtime used as per legal agreements
• Review data, BI billing reports and define and request additional information required to ensure that monthly billing is correct
• Liaise with Finance to ensure revenues recorded are accurate and where necessary query with relevant departments on inconsistent information
• Develop and present presentations for a variety of stakeholders, including monthly presentations to executive management, on all major facets of the team's responsibilities
• Develop reports to increase management awareness to enable better management decision making of actual and potential areas of risk/exposure and patterns identified during the analysis and investigation process and recommend appropriate action to either prevent or mitigate the risk.
• Relate information across a number of dimensions, highlight areas of interest for the business, and apply the correct measurements and analysis techniques
• Analysing data sources and producing charts on observed discrepancies over time
• Analyses of information thoroughly and effectively to determine the severity and extent of customer requirements and/or software problems encountered
• Prepare and deliver accurate billing reports, reconciliations, variance analyses, partner statements, and management information as required
• Produce recurring and ad hoc reporting on invoice status, discrepancies, credits, rebates, outstanding issues, and billing quality indicators
• Ensure all billing activities comply with internal governance, financial controls, contractual obligations, and audit requirements
• Maintain proper documentation of billing methodologies, assumptions, approvals, and issue logs
• Support internal and external audit requests by providing required schedules, evidence, and explanations

Billing disputes resolution and Partner management

• Resolve billing disputes and reconciliation errors
• Review billing reports produced by CDRator and Data Warehouse for validity and accuracy in terms of the MVNO agreements
• Review and approve all validated Credit Note claims and/or Promotional commercials for all MVNE/Os.
• Manage relationships with MVNO’s and account managers
• Hold regular meetings with billing and/or account managers for any changes to agreements, commissions discount structures and implement changes
• Investigate and resolve billing discrepancies, queries, and disputes raised by partners or internal stakeholders in a timely and professional manner
• Conduct root-cause analysis on recurring billing issues and recommend corrective actions to prevent recurrence
• Liaise with finance, commercial, IT, product, operations, and external partners to verify disputed items and establish factual resolution
• Prepare supporting schedules, reconciliations, and explanatory analysis to substantiate billing outcomes.
• Track dispute trends, turnaround times, and common error categories to improve billing stability and partner experience

Commercial analysis

• Extract, analyse and evaluate any required source data from data sources using software coding and present such analysis
• Recommended new commercial structures in designing promotional offers to enable existing and/or new MVNE/O Partners
• Prepare the required Memo’s for approval
• Liaise and advise during negotiations with MVNE/O commercial teams with regards to the finalisation of new Commercials
• Support the development and implementation of new promotional, pricing, discounting, and commercial models by assessing billing feasibility and operational impact.
• Review proposed commercial structures to ensure they can be accurately configured, measured, billed, and reported
• Provide billing-related input during product launches, partner onboarding, tariff changes, and commercial amendments
• Identify risks associated with new or revised commercial terms and recommend controls to ensure billing compliance from implementation
• Collaborate with product, commercial, and finance teams to ensure new initiatives are operationally sound and revenue-assured before go-live

Process Improvement and Operational Efficiency

• Continuously identify opportunities to improve billing processes, controls, reconciliations, systems usage, and reporting efficiency
• Document process gaps and recommend practical, sustainable solutions to improve billing accuracy and reduce manual intervention
• Contribute to automation opportunities in billing validations, exception reporting, and reconciliation activities
• Develop and maintain standard operating procedures, process notes, and billing process documentation
• Participate in projects and cross-functional initiatives aimed at enhancing billing operations and commercial governance

Stakeholder Management

• Build and maintain effective working relationships with internal stakeholders, including Commercial, Finance, Revenue Assurance, Product, IT, Customer Operations, and Legal/Procurement where relevant
• Engage professionally with MVNE/O partners on billing matters, ensuring timely communication, credibility, and issue resolution
• Act as a trusted billing specialist by providing sound technical and commercial interpretation of billing outcomes and challenges
• Escalate risks, unresolved issues, or material billing impacts appropriately and timeously

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree (NQF 7) in finance, business, IT or a related field

Experience

• 7-8 years’ relevant experience in commercial billing, finance operations, revenue assurance, telecommunications billing, or a similar specialist environment.
• Telco experience is an added advantage
• Complex billing environments
• Invoice validation and reconciliation
• Credit note and rebate management
• Billing discrepancy investigation and resolution
• Working with large data sets and transactional/usage data
• Partner/vendor/commercial billing in a regulated or high-volume environment
• Experience in telecommunications, MVNO/MVNE environments, wholesale billing, interconnect, or partner settlement environments
• Exposure to revenue assurance, pricing implementation, commercial modelling, or billing system configuration/change support