Have anyone ever tried to integrate Thirdlane with a2billing?
I will start a project this week to integrate my Thirdlane MTE with a2billing so I can do LCR for my customers, and prepaid/postpaid billing on a proper way.
I want to know if there is anyone who have ever played with this combo, and what they found out: issues, shortcuts, everything.
I'm looking for a similiar
I'm looking for a similiar solution right now for a motel. What do you suggest then if a2billing is not up to the job? I'm looking for something for 110 rooms and I have budgeted $3,000 for this part of the project.
Regards;
FSD
We pull the cdr from our
We pull the cdr from our PSTN gateways (Audicodes). If the call went through the gateway, we paid for it and so should the customer (plus some :). The cdr is collected in MySQL and MySQL is also doing the hard work of preparing the records for billing. You really learn the importance of indexes here - and you know right away when you get an index wrong or a query refuses to use an index. The output is a csv file that is imported into our accounting application (Compiere) which generates the invoices and email them as pdf to the customer. The last part (the emailing stuff) saves us quite a few bucks each month compared to national postal service (about $3 on each invoice).
/Ole
You will wish you never put it in service. There will be customer outrage at all the triple cdr entries and 's' destinations when your customers discover that some calls don't bill at all while other calls bill as if they were 3 calls instead of one. end-point pbx's dont make for good billing cdr. They constantly re-write destination numbers. This is especially troublesome for toll-free billing as they often show up with the destination of 's' and/or an extension/feature code.
IF you want to bill off of cdr, you need to send calls through another device that doesn't alter source/destination in order to collect billable cdr records. There are some commercially available billing packages out there; some whose pricing scale with customer count, so that your entry cost is very reasonable and covers the first 1000 customers.
the key information you need to take away from this is that you need a cdr source that is not created from the end-point MTE box.