CDRs and the Federal Universal Service Fund

In many cases BillMax customers want to pass through to the end customer the amount needed to pay into the Federal Universal Service Fund (FUSF). The Federal USF is based on end user revenues for interstate and international calls. The contribution rate for FUSF is set by quarter by the FCC.

BillMax allows three methods to calculate and report this information on the FCC 499 report: Safe Harbor, Traffic Study, and actual billing minutes.

BillMax customers may pay into the FUSF a Safe Harbor amount and bill the end customer their share of the Safe Harbor amount. Different service types have different Safe Harbor percentages from the FCC.

A second methodology is a traffic study. A quarterly traffic study on your network that you document with the FCC/USAC may lend itself to a lower amount needed to pay in. Currently, BillMax does not have a way to conduct a traffic study, but will allow the interstate and international percentages discovered from a traffic study to be entered.

The third method in BillMax is to add a FUSF charge to a customer's bill based the amount billed using CDR data. If a customer has long distance CDRs that are interstate or international, the billing displayed to the customer is separated from the billing for other long distance calls. In addition, the FUSF charge based on the interstate/international calls is added to the customer's bill.

Billing for Plan interstate/international calls is slightly different as typically a customer has a set amount of free minutes and only the overage is billed. If this is the case, the percentage of overage billing considered as interstate/international is the overall percentage of interstate/international calls for all Plan calls.