[Spce-user] Billing confusion

[Daniel Tiefnig]

On 06/12/2012 11:10 PM, Isaac McDonald wrote:
> Hello,

Hej.

> According to the manual "The billing profiles may define a base fee 
> and free time or free money per billing interval. Unused free time
> or money automatically expires at the end of the billing interval."
> I understand this to mean that the billing system is based on a
> prepaid model?

The billing system of the CE only supports postpaid models. The quoted
statements apply nonetheless.

> Is it possible to have the account show a negative balance so I can 
> use the system in a post-paid model? Am I going about this the wrong 
> way?

The account balance is not decreased below zero, money is only taken
from the balance if the balance is positive. The rating engine will take
money from the balance as long as it is positive, and will export CDRs
with a rate of "0". When the balance is zero, the CDRs wil have the
customer cost set to the actual cost. This is done to support the "free
money" setting of the billing profile, which is added to the account
balance at the beginning of each billing interval (month).

The interval balance will show the complete amount (both taken from the
balance and customer costs in the CDR) of money spent. If you want to
get the amount of money to invoice the customer without the "free
money", you'll have to call get_voip_account_fees() in the SOAP/XML-RPC
interface, or process the exported CDRs in an external billing system.

> Why did the system allow me to place a call if there is no money on
> the account?

Because it's a postpaid system. The CE does not have a call control
module which allows to deny or interrupt calls based on account
balances, so prepaid balances can not be supported. The PRO has such a
call control module, and thus also supports prepaid billing profiles.

> How do I change the currency symbol on the account page to a $
> instead of the Euro symbol?

In the NGCP Administration Interface? This should change automatically
when the currency symbol is changed in the billing profile. I've created
a ticket for that. It's only a visual problem, and does not have any
functional impact. The CSC interface does show the correct currency
based on the billing profiles already.

br,
daniel