Design and Implementation of SMS Based Water Billing System

Design and Implementation of SMS Based Water Billing System

CHAPTER ONE

AIM and OBJECTIVES Aim

To design and implement an SMS based Water Billing System

Project Objectives

To study and investigate on the current system
To conduct a literature review on SMS based Water Billing System
To investigate the most appropriate tool for the development of a web-based System
To design and implement a database for SMS based Water Billing System
To design and implement a front-end tool
To evaluate the tools, techniques and methods used to design and implement the propose

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

INTRODUCTION TO BILLING

Bill is a written note of goods sold, services rendered, or work done, with the price or charge, or an invoice. (http://wiktionary.org).

Cambridge Advance Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus defined Water Bill as “a regular charge that is made to people for the use of their local water supply”.

Billing is the aggregation of all non-recurring, periodic, and chargeable events on an account-by-account basis. It is also the calculation of all outstanding charges and available discounts and bonuses. (http://www.tutorialspoint.com)

Webster’s College Dictionary (2010), define billing as “Billing is the preparing or sending out of bills or invoices. The amount of business done by a firm within a specified period of time or a cost of goods or services billed to a customer”.

TYPES OF BILLING

There are two types of billing which are postpaid billing and prepaid billing. (Hatem, 2012)

Postpaid billing

In postpaid billing the customer may pay an insurance payment in advance, and he may pay the installation or setup fees, and in each billing cycle he will be invoiced (receive a bill) to pay for his usage of the service.

Prepaid billing

In prepaid billing the customer buys a given amount of credits (duration, volume, number of events) and is then allowed to use the corresponding network resources as long as their account is in credit. Billing system receives customer usage records from the network elements and adjusts the customer credits. When their credit has been used up, network usage will be restricted. Prepaid corresponds to a real-time process, because transactions are only allowed if the user account is in credit, and this has to be checked in real-time.

CHAPTER THREE

SYSTEM ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTION

Systems are created to solve problems. One can think of the systems approach as an organized way of dealing with a problem. In this dynamic world, the subject System Analysis and Design (SAD) mainly deals with the software development activities.

System analysis is a process of collecting factual data, understand the processes involved, identifying problems and recommending feasible suggestions for improving the system functioning. This involves studying the business processes, gathering operational data, understand the information flow, finding out bottlenecks and evolving solutions for overcoming the weaknesses of the system so as to achieve the organizational goals. System Analysis also includes subdividing of complex process involving the entire system, identification of data store and manual processes. (National Institute of Open Schooling, 2014)

CHAPTER FOUR

SYSTEM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

INTRODUCTION

System design and implementation are the most crucial phase in the development of any system, based on the user demands and the detail analysis of the existing system, the new system need to be designed using the two stages involved that is preliminary or general design and structure or detail design therefore, in designing any system, it is necessary to guarantee that the end product will display neither functional nor performance failure. (Přibyl, 2011).

It is then necessary to predict the performance of systems when they are under design and development, as well as to predict the impact of changes in configurations of existing systems, as such before actually implementing the system designed into operations, a test plan should be developed and run on a giving set of test data where the output of the test should match the expected output after the test and having the user acceptance of the new system developed, the implementation phase begins; during this phase new system will be turned in to practice.

CHAPTER FIVE

SUMMARY, CONCLUSION, AND RECOMMENDATION

This is the final chapter of this project and will briefly summarized the whole that was written right from chapter one to chapter five taking into consideration the most important points and concluded by stating what was achieved, there by recommending what needs to be achieved in the future.

SUMMARY

The system for SMS Based Water Billing system (A case study of Bagudo Local Government Water Board) has been successfully designed. This project research work consists of five chapters which will be summarized below:

In chapter one, background of the study, statement of the problem, aims and objectives, significance of the study, scope and limitations of the study and definition of some terms were discussed.

In chapter two, relevant literatures were discussed; definition of bills, type of bills, classifications of bills, online (electronic bills), features of online bills, advantages of online bills, disadvantages of online bills, review of some existing billing systems and software tools that were used in the development of the system such as HTML, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL etc.

In chapter three, analysis was carried out in terms of; analysis of the current manual system, analysis of the input, analysis of the output, analysis of the existing system procedure, files maintained, web-design methodology and the expectations of the new system were discussed.

In chapter four, a detailed explanation of the proposed system was given in a general term which include; new input requirements, new system procedure, new output requirements, new

RECOMMENDATION

After undergoing a critical analysis of the existing system and compared it with the application designed, it is recommended for the Bagudo Local Government Water Board to deploy the system as a means of managing and sending of bills to their consumers, since the execution and implementation of this application was implemented and tested in an online environment.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

The system at its current state can be implemented and will function effectively. But for the sake of other interested students that will like to extend this project in the near future, I have the below suggestions for them:

The result shows that billing method used by this system is not sufficient therefore I will suggest and improvement in the method of billing such as Unmetered billing for consumers with no
Also payments option used by this system is not sufficient therefore I will suggest andimprovement in the payment options (the system should offer various payment options for consumer). For example by breaking down your bill into affordable amounts (part payment).
Also third party deduction schemes (also called ‘Water Direct’) should be added, meaning that if you are working with a particular organization or government it may be possible for payments to be made directly to the water board from your

REFERENCES

Achebe. I. D. (2002): Comparative Studies on Web Design Methodologies: [online] Accessed from: http://www.dsic.upv.es/~west2001/iwwost01/. Retrieved on 3rd March, 2014
ClickSUMO (2011) SMS is still king article by clickSUMO. Available at http://www.clicksumo.com/sms-is-still-king/
Check Free Research Services. (August 2007). Consumer Billing and Payment Trends 2002- 2007; the Volume of Electronic Bill Payments Exceeds Check Bill Payments for the First Time.
Chris Wease (Feb 27, 2013). Billing and Collection System. Seminar Presentation Lead by TWI.Chris Wease, National Sales. Trends in Billing & Payment Technology Sponsor: NCAWWA.
Department Audit Commission Hong Kong (25 March 2008). Customer Care and Billing System of the Water Supplies Report No. 50, available on the website at http://www.aud.gov.hk.
David R. Brooks (2007), Guide to HTML, JavaScript and PHP For Scientists and Engineers,
doc. Ing. Ondřej Přibyl, (2011). System Analysis and Design of ITS, Available at http://zolotarev.fd.cvut.cz/sni/. Retrieved 2014-07-2.
Electronic bill presentment and payment (In English). Available at http://www.webopedia.com/term/e/. Retrieved 2014-02-13.

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