A charging session can be over in minutes, but settling who earns what from it can take weeks.
Behind every session sit revenue-sharing agreements with site hosts, roaming settlements across currencies and tax rules, employee reimbursements, and card payments to reconcile. Each new partner, market, or business model adds another layer.
Yet the charging platform has traditionally stopped at the rated session. Everything after it gets settled elsewhere. It’s either outsourced, at rising cost and dependence, or managed in-house through ERP and CRM systems, with all the integrations and maintenance that come with them.
Neither scales well. So how do you grow the financial operations behind your network without multiplying cost and complexity, or giving up control?
Two ways operators handle billing and settlement today
At ICNC 2026 Stefan Ivanov, AMPECO’s CRO and co-founder, described the CPMS gives you “the charging sessions, calculated with the proper rate, and you need to handle it yourself.” From that point, operators take one of two routes.
Outsourcing
The operator hands the process to a specialist provider: a billing service, a reimbursement provider, a clearing house. “Hopefully their tools are efficient enough,” as Ivanov put it. The process then runs on the provider’s software, rules and release schedule.
Three costs come with it. Visibility drops first. Invoices, payouts and statements live in the provider’s system, so when a site host calls about an invoice or an employee asks why a payout is short, the support team often cannot see what the customer received. Control goes next: a new contract term or fee model waits in the provider’s queue. And the provider charges per transaction or takes a margin, so the bill grows with every session the network adds.
Building it in-house
The operator keeps the process and builds it around their own existing systems. In Ivanov’s words, that means “a path where you need to integrate ERP, CRMs, and send the invoice, reconcile payments and so on.”
That keeps control, and it is hard to get right. Each process becomes its own integration project, with the sessions, partner terms, tax rules and payment data stitched together across systems. It needs people: finance staff to run each billing cycle, and developers or an ERP integrator to absorb every new fee model, tax rule, partner type or reimbursement policy. And every integration added is one more to maintain when either side changes.
Why both are under pressure now
Both models work for plenty of operators, including utilities that built their finance processes around ERP and CRM years ago. What has changed is how much each model costs as networks grow, how much control operators want, and what a charging platform is expected to cover.
Cost grows with the network. A provider’s margin rises with transaction volume, and an in-house build needs more development each time the business adds a partner type or a market. Eldrive, which runs the AMPECO platform in three countries, manages more than 500 B2B partners, each with its own revenue share and reporting. At that scale, every manual step in either model is repeated hundreds of times each billing cycle.
Control has become a competitive question. The operators AMPECO works with describe two opposite pressures. Those running in-house builds want to cut development costs as far as they can while keeping the processes that set them apart. Those relying on outsourced or all-in-one providers want to take more of their operations back, provided the platform is automated enough that in-sourcing does not mean hiring a back office.
The market has also moved. Charging platforms are starting to cover areas that used to sit outside the CPMS entirely, and partner invoicing and employee reimbursement are among the first. The work operators once had to buy or build around the platform is moving into the platform itself.
The AMPECO approach: automation under your full control
AMPECO’s answer is a third model. On the ICNC26 masterclass stage in Berlin, Ivanov presented it as the direction AMPECO is taking for these processes: the platform automates as much of each one as it can, and the operator keeps full control over how it runs. For B2B invoicing he set the goal plainly: “Our goal is to provide you a solution that’s automated, keeps you in full control, and helps you cover as much as possible out of the B2B invoicing.”
The model follows from the platform strategy AMPECO set for 2026 onwards: extend what operators get out of the box, in two directions at once. In breadth, the platform takes on areas that used to sit outside the CPMS, such as partner invoicing and charging reimbursement. In depth, it makes existing features more capable, so they cover more of the edge cases operators used to handle by hand. Read more about depth and breadth in our latest post here.
What keeps it from becoming another all-in-one lock-in is the condition Ivanov attached to it: “It’s not a take it or leave it … you can just pick and choose the parts that you want, and the things that you want to keep outside of the platform.”
The choice works at two levels. The operator decides which processes run in the platform, and inside each process, which steps the platform runs and which stay in existing systems. AMPECO’s integrated platform applies the same principle to core workflows such as invoicing: “Add, remove, or modify only the steps that need to reflect your unique business strategy.”
AMPECO took the same position on the platform itself. Its answer to the build-or-buy question was an integrated platform with the simplicity of all-in-one and the flexibility of a modular stack. The third model carries that thinking one level down, from which platform an operator chooses to how each process runs on top of it.
| Outsourced | Built in-house | AMPECO approach: automated, split chosen by you | |
| Visibility | Documents and data live in the provider’s system | Full, inside your own systems | Each output sits beside the sessions it came from, where your team already work |
| Control | Set by the provider’s rules and roadmap | Full | You set the rules, and keep chosen steps in your own systems |
| Effort | Low for the team, plus the provider’s fees on every transaction | An integration project per process, owned by your team | Configuration, plus integration only for the steps kept outside |
| When a rule changes | Waits in the provider’s queue | Lands on your developers or ERP integrator | Changed in the platform’s configuration; your own systems change only for the steps you kept |
How AMPECO runs these processes today: five examples
At the masterclass, Ivanov walked through the processes where AMPECO has gone furthest. Each one starts from the same place, the rated session, and each one shows where the platform now carries on and where the operator can step in.
B2B partner invoicing
The CPMS used to stop at the rated session. Finance pulled the sessions, applied each partner’s revenue share and fees, issued invoices from the ERP or a provider’s system, and matched the payments.
AMPECO now covers the flow step by step. Fee splits live in partner contracts with version history, and billing details and contacts sit on the partner record, so the revenue calculation runs on terms the operator set. Since July 2026, the platform issues partner invoices straight from settlement data, for a whole set of partners in one batch at period close. Since August 2026, the same action issues a self-billing invoice when the operator owes the partner. Invoices can go to the partner’s billing contact by email, and payments are tracked against each invoice.
Any of those steps can stay outside. An operator that wants to keep invoicing in its ERP can do so. One AMPECO customer, for example, takes settlement reports and charge detail records (CDRs) from the platform and issues the documents itself, with external IDs matching each record to its accounting counterpart through the Public API.
Stefan Spassov, CEO of Eldrive, described what changed once partner settlement moved onto AMPECO: “We eliminated a huge part of the manual labor associated with clearing our financial relationships with partners.”
Charging reimbursement
Employee charging is harder to reimburse than fuel because it happens at home, on the road and at the employer’s own chargers. The choice has looked the same as for invoicing: a reimbursement provider working from charging data it had to source separately, or an internal team collecting home charging records and calculating payouts in its own systems.
On AMPECO, an operator that already works with a reimbursement provider can keep it: third-party integrations give that provider API access to home charging sessions. An operator that calculates payouts itself takes the data from reimbursement reporting and exports. For the fleet side of the question, see our guide to managing employee home charging reimbursement.
Payment terminal reconciliation
Matching card payments to sessions has usually ended in an export and a spreadsheet. Since September 2026, AMPECO reconciles sessions started on a payment terminal with the captured card payment and its reference, which finance can search and export.
Roaming settlement
Roaming settlement usually goes to a clearing service or becomes a monthly spreadsheet job. AMPECO supplies the CDRs that settlement starts from, and the operator decides where the matching and booking happen.
Fiscalization
Where a market requires fiscalization, AMPECO issues receipts and invoices and routes them through a certified provider that the operator contracts and the platform integrates. Avalara covers Poland’s KSeF and Italy’s SDI, for example, and Facturapi covers Mexico’s CFDI.
Where to start: map one process, step by step
In both traditional models, an operator pays the same way for every step of a process, whether that step is a decision that shapes the business or a task repeated hundreds of times a month. A provider takes a margin on each transaction; an in-house build costs developer time for each change. As the network grows, that cost grows with it, and the decisions that matter end up in a provider’s rules or in custom code few people on the team can change.
To see what that means for your network, take one financial process you outsource or run in-house and walk through it with the person who runs it, usually someone in finance or operations. List its steps, from the rated session to the payment. Mark the ones that hold a decision your business depends on, such as how fees are split, what an employer reimburses or who owns the customer relationship. The rest (building the document, sending it to the right contact, keeping it tied to the sessions behind it) is repeated work a platform can run, connected to the systems and providers you keep. The unmarked steps are where your provider’s margin or your developers’ hours go today.
Whatever you leave with your current provider or in-house build stays there. Only the steps you move need setting up in the platform.
That is the trade AMPECO is building toward: the platform takes on more of the repeated work with each release, and the decisions that set an operator apart stay with the operator.
Tell us which processes you run outside the platform today, and we’ll show you which steps AMPECO can run and which you keep. Book a demo built around your current set-up.
