Fintech, billing and payments
A billing engine that calculates correctly, collects on time, and talks directly to the payment gateways and the banks.
The problem this solves
Manual billing breaks exactly when the business grows. More clients, more rates and more edge cases mean more errors, and more of the operations team’s time spent on corrections and on calls with customers.
The second problem is sync. The payment gateway knows one thing, the financial system knows another, and the gap between them surfaces at the end of the month. While it is being sorted out, invoices are delayed and days sales outstanding stretch.
A good billing engine solves both: it calculates by clear rules, logs every line, and talks directly to the gateway and the bank.
How Target runs such projects
We either own the project end to end, or join an existing team and develop alongside it. On financial projects we start by sitting with the collections people, because they know the edge cases no document describes.
The specification turns the pricing model into rules. The architecture separates charge calculation, the payment gateway interface and the reporting to financial systems, so a change on one side does not break the other. Development moves in versions, with tests on real data and a parallel run against the existing process.
After going live there is monitoring of clearing failures, handling of exceptions, and further development as new products and rates arrive.
Example project
We built an automated billing and clearing engine for an organization with large financial volumes, connected directly to payment gateways and to financial management systems. The result in the field: about 90% fewer operational billing errors, and shorter days sales outstanding thanks to automatic real time reconciliation.
How a project starts
- 01 Project ownership
We either own the project end to end, or join the client's existing team and work alongside it. We agree on which way to work at the start.
- 02 Specification and architecture
The specification is written with the people who actually use the system. The architecture follows: separation between components, a permission model, and the way external systems connect.
- 03 Build and production
Development moves in versions, with code review and a fixed code standard. After going live there is ongoing monitoring, incident handling and further development.
Questions we get asked
We already work with a payment gateway. Can we keep it?
Yes. We connect to the gateway you use and to your bank clearing systems, and we build the engine so a provider can be added or replaced without rewriting it.
What happens to our complex pricing model?
It goes into the engine as rules, not as separate code per client. Rates, discounts and tiers are defined in one place, and the operations team can see how any charge was calculated.
How do we know the charges are correct?
Every charge is logged with its source, and any invoice line can be opened to see what it is made of. Before moving to production we run the engine in parallel with the existing process and compare results.