Skype
During of the years of rapid growth, Skype paid quite little attention to automatisation of the back-end processes. Due to the growing volumes of the transactions generated by the paid services, both the time-lag and the manual work related to revenue accounting and reporting became less and less acceptable. Therefore, at one point, the decision was made by the financial department in Luxembourg to automate the whole revenue journaling process completely, supporting simultaneously both US Gaap and IAS standards.
Tender was carried out among three preselected international candidates. Icefire was chosen to design and implement the solution because we had the best understanding of the arised issues during the discussions in tender process – both from the financial accounting, as well as from the IT point of view.
During 2009 we implemented fully automated real-time revenue accounting system (RJS) for Skype, to support more detailed, automated and reliable income reporting in-time.
The biggest challenge of this project was enormous amount of transactions to be processed. At the beginning of the project, Skype had over half a billion users, 20 million people were using it simultaneously at the any moment, and about 28% of worlds international calls were conducted by using Skype. This fact had been taken seriously into account during the all stages of the project, especially during the development of the System Architecture.
Another complex issue was to analyse and consolidate all the journaling and accounting rules. Some of them were undocumented and had to be found by just reading the source code of DWH loading procedures, some where just not consistent with each other. In addition to that, during this project Skype launched the new services to the market, which also had to be taken into account in the middle of the project.
As a result of this project, revenue accounting was fully automated – after a completion of a call or purchase, the data about each transaction were automatically sent to RJS, immediately processed there according to the rules and converted to the format for importing directly to the Skype’s GL. The time-lag for reporting revenues was reduced to less than 24 hours from more than 2 months previously.
Interesting learning point for Icefire was to coordinate the work between the offices located in London, Luxembourg, Prague and Tallinn. Though we used lot of skype and conference calls during the entire project, often there was no substitute to meet the people face to face.