Introducing TimelyTAXES™: A High-Speed, In-House Tax Engine Built for Telecom
We needed a reliable, fast, telecom-aware tax engine—so we built our own. Introducing TimelyTAXES.
As telecom taxation becomes increasingly complex, service providers need more than a generic billing system. They need a platform that can handle telecom’s regulatory demands without slowing them down.
TimelyTAXES ↗️ is our new high-speed, in-house engine optimized specifically for the communications industry. It eliminates external API dependencies, delivers accurate calculations, and performs up to 10X faster than the third-party tax services we used before.
Speed, accuracy, and complete control—that’s the TimelyBill advantage. Here’s how we approach telecom-grade taxation.
Designed for Telecom Providers, Resellers, and MVNOs
TimelyBill was purpose-built for communications companies. It supports:
- Wireline and wireless services
- VoIP and unified communications
- IoT and M2M operations
- MVNOs, resellers, and multi-carrier providers
- Subscription, usage-based, and resale billing models
Unlike generic billing platforms, TimelyBill distinguishes between standard sales tax and telecom-specific surcharges—such as federal USF, TRS, local 911, statewide telecom fees, and municipal communications taxes—ensuring each charge type is calculated and displayed correctly on customer invoices.
In-House Speed: Zero External APIs, Better Performance
TimelyBill leverages a leading telecom tax database to power its self-hosted, high-speed calculation engine.
Instead of sending live tax calls to third-party systems, TimelyBill imports updated tax content monthly into a secure, internal database. This design:
- Eliminates latency from external API calls
- Removes dependence on vendor uptime or rate limits
- Provides near real-time performance even when rating thousands of CDRs, events, or complex product bundles
Out of the box, TimelyBill’s tax database includes:
- USF, E911, and state/local surcharges for all U.S. jurisdictions
- Wireless, VoIP, and reseller-specific tax structures
- Logic for bundled, mixed taxable/non-taxable services
- Interstate vs. intrastate rules
- Tax handling for IoT and M2M transactions
This architecture gives telecom providers unmatched speed, reliability, and control.
Customer-Controlled Tax Mapping
TimelyBill provides the tools, not the rulings. Each product and service in your catalog can be mapped to its applicable tax category within the platform.
- Default mappings for common telecom products are available.
- Customers can modify or extend mappings to match their business model.
- Monthly tax updates provide accurate rates and comprehensive jurisdiction coverage.
- Safe-harbor percentages can be defined where applicable, allowing customers to manage allowable exemptions within proper regulatory bounds.
- Recovery Fees can be configured as customer-defined surcharges, applied separately from regulated taxes to support cost-recovery strategies.
This approach strikes a balance between automation and flexibility, allowing providers to remain agile while maintaining control over tax decisions.
Precision in Usage-Based Taxation
Telecom taxes depend heavily on where and how usage occurs. TimelyBill supports precise jurisdictional tax allocation by capturing the metadata required for event-level taxation, including:
- Origin and termination
- Rate center and call type
- Interstate, intrastate, and local boundaries
This enables accurate taxation for:
- Voice minutes
- SMS/MMS
- Data and IoT events
- Origination- and termination-based 911 or USF surcharges
Providers also benefit from detailed tax reporting, audit-ready exports, and granular breakdowns of all tax and surcharge components.
Fully Accessible Tax Data for Compliance Partners
As part of our transition to TimelyTaxes, we’ve taken extra steps to ensure all tax-related data is complete, consistent, and fully accessible—not just for billing, but for every downstream compliance workflow.
All tax data previously generated through third-party engines remains stored and available within TimelyBill. We retain all historical tax data and additional transaction-level fields that external tax engines typically do not expose.
- Full tax records (stored locally within TimelyBill)
- Calculated exemption amounts
- Stored tax-on-tax amounts
It’s also important to understand how TimelyBill structures its exported compliance data. The file contains post-rated results—the exact values your compliance provider needs for filing and reconciliation. These include gross amounts, taxable amounts, tax rates, tax liabilities, and aggregated totals. The export does not include internal setup inputs used during rating (such as tax code selection, safe-harbor settings, exemptions, or service-level classifications). As a result, compliance vendors work only with the fully rated, authoritative outputs produced by TimelyTaxes inside TimelyBill.
Compliance exports include all required jurisdictional, financial, and authority-level fields—such as billing period, taxable revenue, tax rates, liabilities, and customer-level identifiers. Together, these fields represent TimelyTaxes' complete tax output, stored at the transaction level for transparency, traceability, and historical reference.
This is the core advantage: TimelyBill stores the entire rated dataset locally, including values that external systems typically do not expose. Whatever your compliance provider requests—jurisdiction codes, exemption calculations, tax-on-tax amounts, historical lookup values—TimelyBill already has it. Your billing system becomes the source of truth, not an external API.
This approach ensures your organization retains full control of its tax information, maintains a reliable audit trail, and can support any compliance partner with accurate, consistent, and fully accessible tax data.
Integration Flexibility
TimelyBill’s RESTful APIs allow seamless integration with systems such as Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, or QuickBooks. Customers can use API integrations to achieve near real-time synchronization of order, rating, and tax data across platforms.
Enterprise-Grade Hosting
TimelyBill operates from Switch Tier 5® Platinum data centers located in Atlanta, GA, and Las Vegas, NV—two of the most advanced and secure colocation facilities in the world. These data centers deliver unmatched reliability, sustainability, and physical protection for mission-critical telecom operations.
Key infrastructure features include:
- Fully fault-sustainable architecture with redundant power, cooling, and network paths
- 100% uptime design specification with A/B power feeds and continuous monitoring
- Multi-layer physical security, including biometrics and 24/7 surveillance
- Carrier-diverse connectivity and independent fiber routes
- Water-independent cooling systems capable of indefinite operation
- 100% renewable energy with PUE < 1.3
- Compliance-ready environment supporting SOC 1 Type II, PCI-DSS, and strict data-protection frameworks
This backbone ensures providers experience the reliability, security, and performance needed for mission-critical telecom billing operations.
Summary: Telecom Taxation Without the Bottlenecks
TimelyTAXES brings together telecom-native billing intelligence, a self-hosted high-speed tax engine, and modern data center reliability to give providers a fast, flexible, future-ready billing foundation.- High-speed, in-house tax engine with zero external API dependencies
- Up to 10X faster than previous third-party tax providers
- Out-of-the-box coverage for USF, E911, wireless, VoIP, and reseller scenarios
- Monthly updated, self-hosted telecom tax database
- Customer-controlled tax mapping tools
- Accurate usage-based taxation and audit-ready reporting
- Enterprise-grade hosting in Tier 5® data centers
- Integration-ready via RESTful APIs
TimelyBill delivers speed, clarity, and telecom-specific intelligence—while ensuring that ultimate tax-compliance decisions remain where they belong: with your certified experts.
Important Note: TimelyBill is not a tax compliance company and does not provide legal or regulatory advice. Customers should confirm all tax classifications and compliance interpretations with their own certified tax advisors or compliance partners.
TimelyTAXES is a trademark of TimelyBill.