Billing

Billing feature overview

• CDR have two price types - customer price and operator price to see differences between various operators.
• multiple billing tables - for each of your operator and for each customer
• billing watchdog rule quota - per hour / day / week / month aggregated per src IP or per tel. number
• billing watchdog rule expensive destination

Settings -> Billing configuration

In this section you can see sections "billing type / rules, state holidays, operator assignment, customer assignment, exclude, aggregation, currency and settings.

billing type / rules

Here you need to create at least one billing table which will be used to bill customer and operator price. If you do not need to have customer price but only operator price, just create one billing table for each operator (if you have different pricing for each operator) and do not check "Default customer billing" checkbox. You will then assign the billing table in section "operator assignment"

• Name: name of the billing table
• State holidays: choose holidays table which will be used if peak is enabled
• Default price: is price per minute (offpeak if peak/offpeak enabled)
• Enable peak / offpeak: enable billing based on peak / offpeak
• Default price peak: is price per minute for peak period (and offpeak if peak/offpeak enabled)
• Default T1: number of seconds for the first impulse.
• Default T2: lenght of period. For example call was 30 seconds length and T1 is 10 and T2 is 6 the number of seconds to bill will be 10 + 4*6 = 34 seconds.
• Default customer billing: if checked all customer prices who are not assigned in "customer assignment" will be billed based on this billing table

After creating billing table you need to add billing rules: (you can export / import them via CSV)

• name: of the billing rule
• prefix number: rule will match based on the same prefix
• fixed number: rule will match based on the same exact number
• price: price for the destination (offpeak if peak/offpeak enabled)
• price peak: price for the destination in peak period (if peak/offpeak enabled)
• override default peak offpeak: change the default peak/offpeak
• t1: set custom T1 timer
• t2: set custom T2 timer

state holidays

Table of state holidays which you can assign in billing table. Those days will be treated as offpeak. You need to define this only in case your billing are based on peak/offpeak.

operator assignment

To be able to bill CDR based on to what operator call is going through you need to create rule for each of operator and select billing table. If you create and assign the table customer price will be not calculated if call is coming from operator. This way the system knows that it should bill only outgoing calls. If you would like to have customer and operator price in CDR you need to create at least two billing tables and the customer one set as "default customer billing" and assign the operator billing table in this section to the operator IPs.

You can override default international prefix settings for each operator (for details see #settings

customer assignment

If you need to bill some customers differently so the default customer billing table is not enough you can create rules to apply different billing tables to customers based on their source IP or source Tel. numbers. (prefixes or fixed numbers)

You can override default international prefix settings for each operator (for details see #settings

exclude

If you do not want to bill CDR for some IP or numbers you can set rules for them here. Rules allows to choose for what source or destination IP should be excluded as well as for source or destination tel. prefixes / numbers.

aggregation

Aggregation feature summarize called sum based on ip source or tel. number source for hours days weeks months. This aggregation is used in fraud/alerts in billing over quota rules.

settings

• enable by addresses: aggregates per source IP address
• enable by numbers: aggregates per tel. number
• week start
• hours / days / weeks / months / years: set how long should be various date ranges kept in the database.

exclude addresses

• which IP addresses (src or dst) should be excluded from aggregation. This is usefull to not aggregate operator source IP or your SIP proxy source IP so the aggregation data will have only customers data.

exclude numbers

• which numbers (src or dst) should be excluded from aggregation. It is always good to set addresses first like your operator sip source ip addresses so your database will be not filled with data you do not want to use.

currency

You do not need to create currency if you have only one. If you will have more currencies the GUI will recalculate it to the base currency which is set as "Main currency". It uses google services to get current exchange rate. The recalculation is not stored into the database. In database is always the original price thus recalculation is used only when viewing data.

• Code: USD for example
• Custom code: symbol "$" for example
• Name: name of the currency
• Country: Select the country
• Main currency: if selected all currencies in CDR view and charts etc. are recalculated to this currency
• Description

settings

• international prefixes: list of all prefixes used to distinguish between local and international numbers. Default is 00, +
• min. international length: if number does not match to international prefixes (for example lets say you are calling to Czech with normalized prefix 420123123123) and numbers of digits are greater then this value the number is treated as international. If you do not set this value it is not used at all.
• local number are in: if number is detected as local number (does not contains international prefix and is less then min. international length) it will be prefixed with international prefix according to what you choose. This is in case the a destination number is without + or 00 and without local international prefix

Watchdog

In alerts / anti fraud there is two billing watchdog rules. You have to enable aggregation in billing settings.

Billing over quota

Billing over quota is checking total billed sum per source IP or souce Tel. number or grouped source IPs / numbers for hour / day / week and month aggregation periods. The purpose of this rule is possibility to be alerted globally or individually if there is any account which has billed sum higher then set threshold during the last hour day etc.

• Enabled: enable/disable rle* Every N minutes: how often to check the rule* Enable hyperlinks: create hyperlink in email alert to quickly go to the rule * hour / day / week / month: set maximum amount of calling costs to trigger the alert. * summary: if enabled all included caller numbers / ip addresses are summarized and then evaluated instead of taking each IP/tel.num separatly. This is for case where you want to group all customers numbers or ip addresses. * Include / Exclude IP addresses / numbers: allow to filter only calls you want to get the alert. If you do not specify any include/exclude rules the rule will trigger for every IP / tel. number individually.

Billing high rate

The second watchdog rule is to trigger alert if calling to destination with higher cost per minute then set threshold. For example you want to know if someone is calling to destination 0.5USD / minute.

• Enabled: enable/disable rle* Every N minutes: how often to check the rule* Enable hyperlinks: create hyperlink in email alert to quickly go to the rule * Limit: set the cost / minute which will trigger this alert* Include / Exclude IP addresses / numbers: allow to filter only calls you want to get the alert. If you do not specify any include/exclude rules the rule will trigger for every IP / tel. number individually.