Re: Billing Issues

Dale E. Reed Jr. ( (no email) )
Sat, 6 Dec 1997 16:40:47 -0800 ()

On Sat, 6 Dec 1997, Howard Towt wrote:

> 1) The significance of the time of month when charges are consolidated
> --The data cuts off at midnight for the PRIOR month's bill.
> --The CURRENT month's billing starts accumulating from the
> moment the update is run.
> --The customer therefore receives free hours, unless the ISP runs
> the
> consolidation at 00:00:01 on a particular day.

The above is mostly wrong, since Emerald doesn't do monthly billing,
it does anniversary billing.

> 2) The monthly consolidated time logged by Emerald does not match the
> time
> from the SQL query I run to audit the Emerald calculation
> --The time difference is much greater than from the effect in
> (1) above.
> --The database query that I use is:

At it will since the below query is MONTHLY billing. You need to find
the user's expiration date, and adjust the dates according. For example
if the user expires 2/6/97, then the below date should be 11/7/97 to
12/6/97.

> *************************
> DECLARE @timeon smalldatetime, @timeoff smalldatetime, @userid char(16)
>
> Select @timeon = "11/01/97 00:00"
> Select @timeoff = "12/01/97 00:00"
> Select @userid = "testuser"
> ************************

> Because the time shown on the Emerald reports never matches the time
> from the SQL query, I have to manually bill customers. As you can
> imagine, this detracts significantly from the utility of the Emerald
> billing program.

Your making assumptions about how Emerald bills that you don't
really know for sure. One minor note that will always make the
output difference is that Emerlad rounds UP to the next minute, a
common practice in the telephony industries. Yours doesn't. Thats
means Emerald will be higher in total minutes by the numbers of
calls the user made in its summary.

> Does anyone out there have experience in this area? If I could match
> the math done in the Emerald charge consolidation routine with my SQL
> query, and could kick off an NT process just after midnight to do the
> charge consolidation process, that would help minimize the irritation.

The Emerald consolidation AFAIK is correct (and if anything it may
underbill the user in certain boundary situations). We are working
on a new way to automatically run the consolidation (and eventually
just do away with it) as well.

Dale E. Reed Jr. (daler@iea.com)
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