Introduction
ClearIP’s Billing features enable users to upload rates used for billing customer calls to track customer spending and ensure least cost routing profitability.
The Billing features are used to track a provider’s earnings from providing service to its customers while the LCR features track the provider’s spending from purchasing service. The Billing features can be used with the LCR features to ensure profitability while ClearIP selects least cost routes.
Billing Products
The Billing Products page is used to list the names of the different available product offerings. For example, you may choose to offer three different products named Gold, Silver, and Bronze with each product offering routes of certain price ranges and qualities of service.
Billing Product Policies
The Billing Product Policies table determines which billing products should be used for certain calls. You can match specific SBCs, users, groups, service providers, or calling numbers to any billing product.
Billing Rate Plans
The Billing Rate Plans page lists the names of the rate plans used to bill customers. Each rate plan is connected to a billing product and an effective date. Rate plans can be created with effective dates in the past or future. The effective date and time shown are based on your local time.
When looking at which rate plan to use, ClearIP looks at all rate plans with dates that are effective on the current day or earlier, ignoring rate plans with dates in the future. Then ClearIP chooses the most recent rate plan for a billing product.
Each rate plan must contain a unique name, which can simply be the effective date and the name of the billing product.
To provision a rate deck, you must specify the rate deck format to ClearIP by entering in the row and column numbers for different values. Rates decks must be uploaded as a tab-delimited text file.
You do not have to delete rate decks with an older effective date for a given billing product if you upload more recent rate plan data. ClearIP does not look at older rates if there are more recent rates available for a given provider.
Billing Rates
The Billing Rates table holds rate data used to bill customers. It shows data from all rate plans and all billing products in the same table. Each record in the table must be associated with a predefined billing product and specific rate plan name. Each record represents a row in a rate deck spreadsheet.
ClearIP chooses the best matching record from the applicable billing rates to determine a call’s billing rate. ClearIP records the billing rate used for a call in the SIP Messages page.
The billing rate can also be returned by the ClearIP SIP response in an X-Billing-Rate header. To enable this, go to the SBCs page and set the Return Rates In SIP Response field to Yes.
Each rate column for each record must be filled with a number greater than zero. Rate columns cannot be left blank.