Industry Clearing Services (ICS)

ICS is the part of IATA that deals with all the financial aspects of interline activity. It covers the billing and settlement of passenger, cargo, Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP) and other miscellaneous charges from and to airlines, such as handling fees, navigation charges, catering, and so on. ICS is broken into several different areas of activity as follows:

The ICH provides the means to settle all the billed items sent to and from airlines around the world. Used by more than 400 airlines either directly or via special links, the ICH settles around USD 50 billion of interline billings every year. Its efficiency is so great that airline cash and settlement requirements are reduced by around 75%, and risks for all participants are minimised. The service is accessed by airlines directly through the Internet. More...

Revenue Accounting

The revenue accounting area covers the management and distribution of the rules and procedures that govern interline billing between airlines. More...

Revenue Accounting includes the following services:

• FIRST & FINAL^TM Billing Service
  This is the interline billing mechanism of the future. Instead of going through the normal cycle of billing, rejection, rebilling, further rejection for up to two years, FIRST & FINAL^TM billing service permits airlines to bill and settle in one single pass without rejections. More...
• Interline Sampling
  Interline sampling offers a way to bill other airlines based on a random sample of the total number of transactions billed by an airline. It is more cost-effective than billing each item individually, but not as fast or accurate as FIRST & FINAL^TM billing service. More...
• Interline Data Exchange Centre (IDEC)
  This is a method of creating billings using a single data standard. The billings for each airline are sent to a single processing centre, and consolidated, so that each airline receives one file containing all the billings against it. This improves processing and speeds up the accounting. The facility is used by more than 220 airlines. More...
• IATA Exchange Rates Service
  The service enables access to all the standard exchange rates used by more than 250 airlines for sales and interline billing, including the Five Day Rate and Monthly Mean Rate. More...