ng Accounts Network database management Figure 20.13 Interactions with billing module. Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS an accounts database and at the network level the interaction is with the network management module. The billing system can generate trend reports of services that are generating more revenue that can be used by the marketing and sales team for designing strate- gies to increase business. The billing reports help in planning for investments based on market trends. The billing data is to be used by a sales team in providing infor- mation to customers on what could be the best service plan for a customer based on trends in the specific customer segment that the user falls in. Impact of promotions and discounts on sales of a specific product can be computed from the billing sum- mary report for a specific product. The customer care modules will interact with billing to apply service order adjustments and any specific discounts that need to be offered to the customer on a need basis. For example, a customer might want to cancel a specific service before the end of the billing cycle. In this case the number of days for which the customer has to be billed has to be updated in the billing system based on information pro- vided to the customer support executive. The customer can also call the support desk for clarification on billing related queries. The customer support desk will have access to specific (subset) billing information to service the queries. However, most support professionals ask sufficient authentication queries to ensure that private information is disclosed only to the intended owner of an account. Some support professionals also request permission from customer, if the support personal can access the account owners billing data and if required, modify it. The billing system will interact with the accounting modules in NMS to get the billing records. The billing records generated by the elements in the network are handled by the element managers and network management systems to p