Affiliation-based arrangement for billing
First Claim
1. A method for billing, carried out in a computer, to account for services provided by a provider, comprising the steps of:
- selecting a party from an electronically accessible subscribers file;
ascertaining the location of electronically accessible stored data when said selected party is a financial surrogate, which data contains identities of affiliated subscribers;
accessing said data;
for each affiliated subscriber identified in said data, adding an amount to an account; and
forwarding a request for payment to the financial surrogate for an amount indicated by said account.
1 Assignment
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
An improved system is realized with an arrangement which takes advantage of affiliations that allow concentration of billing. In situations where a party is willing to serve as a financial surrogate for some subscribers of a services provider, savings can be realized by sending the bills for charges accrued by those subscribers ("affiliated subscribers") directly to such a surrogate. The surrogate pays the bills of the affiliated subscribers and may make its own arrangement with the affiliated subscribers to be appropriately compensated. The disclosed method and arrangement employs an affiliation database file to provide information as to who is a financial surrogate for others. Data which affiliates particular subscribers to particular financial surrogates may be under control of the services provider or under control of the financial surrogates. The billing process utilizes the information that identifies financial surrogates and the information about the affiliations of affiliated subscribers. Illustratively, the billing process may begin by first processing the bills for the financial surrogates and thereafter addressing the remaining bills.
228 Citations
43 Claims
-
1. A method for billing, carried out in a computer, to account for services provided by a provider, comprising the steps of:
-
selecting a party from an electronically accessible subscribers file; ascertaining the location of electronically accessible stored data when said selected party is a financial surrogate, which data contains identities of affiliated subscribers; accessing said data; for each affiliated subscriber identified in said data, adding an amount to an account; and forwarding a request for payment to the financial surrogate for an amount indicated by said account. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21)
-
-
22. A method carried out in a computer for billing for services of a provider, comprising the steps of:
-
from a subscribers file, selecting a party that is financially responsible to the provider for service charges, accessing an electronic database containing financial surrogate information, determining, from said database, whether a financial surrogate is specified for said party, which characterizes said party as an affiliated subscriber, when said party is an affiliated subscriber, adding to an account of said financial surrogate an amount which corresponds to at least a portion of the affiliated subscriber'"'"'s service charges, forwarding a request for payment to said financial surrogate which includes said amount, and forwarding a request for payment to said party in the event said financial surrogate fails to pay said amount.
-
-
23. A method carried out in a computer for billing for services of a provider, comprising the steps of:
-
from a subscribers file, selecting a party that has not been accounted for and which is financially responsible to the provider for service charges, accessing an electronic database containing financial surrogate information, determining, from said database, whether a financial surrogate is specified for said party, which characterizes said party as an affiliated subscriber, when said party is an affiliated subscriber, adding to an account of said financial surrogate a billing amount which corresponds to at least a portion of the affiliated subscriber'"'"'s service charges, and marking said affiliated subscriber as being accounted for, repeating the step of selecting a party that is not accounted for, the step of determining, and the step of adding when the selected party is an affiliated subscriber of some financial surrogate from a set of financial surrogates, as long as there are parties in the subscribers file that have not been accounted for, forwarding a request for payment to each of said financial surrogates which includes the amount associated with each of said financial surrogates and forwarding a request for payment to said party in the event said financial surrogate fails to pay said amount. - View Dependent Claims (24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31)
-
-
32. A method carried out in a computer for billing a party that serves as a financial surrogate for affiliated subscribers of a service provider, the method comprising the steps of:
-
identifying said affiliated subscribers, from a database maintained by said billing party, as specified by said financial surrogate, each of said affiliated subscribers being financially responsible to said service provider for services provided by said service provider, in the event said financial surrogate fails to pay for said services, for each of the affiliated subscribers, accessing from a billing database charges owed by the affiliated subscriber, accumulating said accessed charges of all of said affiliated subscribers, submitting the accumulated charges to the financial surrogate and forwarding a request for payment to the affiliated subscriber in the event said financial surrogate fails to pay said amount. - View Dependent Claims (33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43)
-
Specification