getting started with a2billing

7/31/2019 Getting Started With A2Billing

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Getting started with A2Billing – Part 1 Setting upa trunk In this series of articles I’m going to run through how to get up your a2billing systemup and running. A2billing is an opensource billing application for Asterisk and can beused in many different ways – I’ll be documenting just some examples

Some of this setup will depend how you have your main configuration file(/etc/asterisk/a2billing.conf) configured. I will not be discussing that here. Also someof the setup may rely on FreePBX and A2billing being setup to work together.

All of this documentation was created on a sysadminman Asterisk/FreePBX/A2billingVPS. See here for details – http://sysadminman.net/uk-voip-vps.html

Setting up a trunk

We need to setup a trunk to be used for our outbound calls. Obviously you can setupmore than one trunk and route calls to different destinations via different trunks.

I will be using the trunk that I configured in FreePBX here – http://sysadminman.net/blog/archives/335 . As the main settings for the trunk have

been setup in FreePBX we can just call the trunk by it’s name in A2Billing. This trunkis with a provider called callwithus.

To setup a trunk -

Click on TRUNK on the left hand main menu

http://sysadminman.net/blog/2009/getting-started-with-a2billing-part-1-setting-up-a-trunk-447


http://sysadminman.net/uk-voip-vps.html



http://sysadminman.net/blog/archives/335



http://www.callwithus.com/










The next thing I’m going to do is create a “Trunk Provider”. This is not essential (wecan create a trunk with out creating a “provider”) but will be useful when we have

many trunks and want to group them together)

So, click on “Create Provider” and give your provider a name and description – I’musing callwithus. The click Confirm Data

Now I’m going to setup the actual trunk. So click on “Add Trunk”

VOIP-PROVIDER is the one we just created

LABEL is just a text label identifying the trunk



PROVIDER TECHNOLOGY is sip (although it’s also possible to use IAX2 with callwithus Iused SIP)

PROVIDER IP is the name of the trunk that I created in FreePBX here. It’s not essentialto use a precreated trunk I just like all my trunks created in a single place – FreePBX

and the click Confirm Data

And that’s it. Our trunk is ready to use. We can see this by click on List Trunk







Getting started with A2Billing – Part 2 Ratecardsand Call Plans After we’ve created a trunk we need to create a ratecard and assign it to a call plan.This is the main part of the billing application and also the most complicated!

Initially I’m just going to create a ratecard that allows calls Leicester in the UK. Thedialling code for Leicester is 0116 so the international prefix would be 44116 (44being for the UK)

Creating a Ratecard

First click on the RATECARD menu on the left hand side of the screen

Then give your ratecard a name. I called mine “test-rate-card”

Assign the ratecard to use the trunk we created here

And click on CONFIRM DATA

http://sysadminman.net/blog/2009/getting-started-with-a2billing-part-2-ratecards-and-call-plans-458














Now we need to add a rate to our new ratecard. The rate is what determines howmuch we pay for the call and how much we charge for it.

So, click on “Add Rate”

The RATECARD will be the one we created above

The dial prefix is just for Leicester in the UK (44 = UK / 116 – Leicester)

DESTINATION is just a text description field

BUYING RATE is what I will pay for the call per minute. Callwithus prices are in $ so Iwill be paying just $0.014/minute.

BUYRATE MIN DURATION is the shortest time you will be billed for a call – check withyour trunk provider



BUYRATE BILLING BLOCK is the time increment you will be billed for a call – checkwith your trunk provider

SELLING RATE – this is how much you will charge per minute for the call. So I have a$0.006/minute markup on my calls to Leicester

SELLRATE MIN DURATION is the shortest time you will charge for a call

SELLRATE BILLING BLOCK is the time increment you will charge for a call

And that’s all we need to change so click CONFIRM DATA



Creating a Call Plan

A callplan is a collection of rate cards. You might have many different rate cards withrates from many different providers and you bundle them up into a call plan and thenassign the call plan to your customers.

Click on Create Call Plan

Give your call plan a name – I called mine “test-call-plan”

REMOVE INTER PREFIX has been changed to Yes. I need this because, in my rate card,my rate only has 44116 (and not the international code 00 or 011 in front of it) so ifthe customer dials the international access code I need to remove it.

Click on CONFIRM DATA



Now we need to go in and assign the rate card to our call plan

Click on EDIT to the right of the call plan we created

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you can see the rate cards assigned to thecallplan. At this point there won’t be any.

So click on the “test-rate-card” we created and then ADD RATECARD

Now click CONFIRM DATA



In FreePBX click on Inbound Routes on the left hand main menu

Then select “ipkall” (the DID we created here)

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and change the Destination to “Custom Destinations –

a2billing” then click Submit

Don’t forget to click on “Apply Configuration Changes”

Now if we dial our IPKall DID we should be asked by a2billing to “Please enter yourcomplete PIN number”







Getting started with A2Billing – Part 4 Creating acustomer and making a call So we’ve created a trunk to make calls through here, we’ve created a ratecard andcall plan here and we’ve created an access phone number here so we’re finally readyto create a customer!

Creating a calling card customer

Click on CUSTOMERS on the left hand menu

Click Create Customers

We get a big list of options but the only things we need to set are -

BALANCE – set the inital balance for the customer

CALL PLAN – ensure the call plan is set to the one we created here

LASTNAME & FIRSTNAME – not required but definitely useful!

Then click on CONFIRM DATA

http://sysadminman.net/blog/2009/getting-started-with-a2billing-part-4-creating-a-customer-483






















There are obviously a lot more settings I can use when configuring a customer but if I click on

List Customers I can see my customer is setup



So, lets give it a go!

I ring my access number 12532433498 (configured here)

and it asks for my PIN number so I enter 1137742329 (my card number created above)

I now get the message “Please enter the number you wish to call and then enter thepound key” so I dial 011441162572850# (remember I can only dial numbers inLeicester in the UK for now as that is the only rate we created here) and my call ismade! Now, a couple of things have also happened.

If I click on CALL REPORT and then CDR Report I can see that a record has been madeof the call plus the call charges -

and also if I click on CUSTOMER, List Customers and then click on EDIT next to my customer –










and then scroll down to the bottom I can see that my CLID has been added to mycustomer record (this is becuase cid_enable and cid_auto_assign_card_to_cid havebeen enabled in a2billing.conf). This means that next time I call the system from myphone it will know who I am and I will not need to enter my pin number again.

Getting started with A2Billing – Part 5 Importinga ratecard When I setup my ratecard here I only created 1 rate to Leicester in the UK. Ok for testing but

not much use in the real world! So how are we going to enter all of the rates we need – the

answer is to import them. Many ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers) publish a rate file

that you can download. I’m going to use the callwithus (my provider) rate file that you can

download from here.

then I’ve extracted the zip file and saved it to my C drive -

http://sysadminman.net/blog/2009/getting-started-with-a2billing-part-5-importing-a-ratecard-512






http://www.callwithus.com/showrates









I have also rename the file to .txt instead of .csv as there can be problems with itcalled .csv

Now I go to RATECARD, Create new Rate Card

Give your ratecard a name and a description. I like to include the date I am creatingthe ratecard

and click CONFIRM DATA

Now select the Import RateCard menu

Ensure the “Choose the ratecard to import” is set to the rate card you just created



Also the callwithus import file includes “BUYRATE MIN DURATION” and “BUYRATEBILLING BLOCK” information so I have moved those 2 fields over to the “SelectedFields” box

Click on Browse to select your import file then click “Import Ratecard”

helpfully a2billing shows us an example of what it’s going to import. This is the firstrecord in the file.

Click “Continue to Import the Ratecard” if the example looks good



a2billing should now tell you how many rates have been imported

Unfortunately if we now go and look at one of these rates we’ll see that thecallwithus file wasn’t particularly well formatted to be imported into a2billing as-is.

The buy rate is zero, the selling rate is our buying cost and “SELLRATE MIN DURATION/ SELLRATE BILLING BLOCK” are both zero!



So we need to sort this out. What we could have done was edit the file in somethinglike Excel before we imported it to get everything in the correct layout. This isprobably the easiest option, however I’m going to edit my ratecard using SQL in thedatabase. Be sure you know what you’re doing if you choose this option!

First I need to log into mysql. The default database name is mya2billing – yours maydiffer.

# mysql -u asteriskuser -p mya2billing

Enter password:

Welcome TO the MySQL monitor. Commands END WITH ; OR \g.

Your MySQL connection id IS 10748

Server version: 5.0.45 SOURCE distribution

TYPE 'help;' OR '\h' FOR help. TYPE '\c' TO clear the buffer.

mysql>

Next I need to find out the ID of the tarifplan I want to edit

mysql> SELECT id,tariffname FROM cc_tariffplan;

+----+---------------------+



| id | tariffname |

+----+---------------------+

| 1 | test-rate-card |

| 2 | callwithus 03-02-09 |

+----+---------------------+ 2 ROWS IN SET (0.00 sec)

Now I’m going to set the buy rate to be the sell rate that was loaded from the importfile -

mysql> UPDATE cc_ratecard SET buyrate = rateinitial WHERE idtariffplan = 2

;

Query OK, 9344 ROWS affected (0.11 sec)

ROWS matched: 9345 Changed: 9344 Warnings: 0

Now I’m going to add 20% on to my sell rate -

mysql> UPDATE cc_ratecard SET rateinitial = (rateinitial*1.2) WHERE idtari

ffplan = 2;



Now to set the “SELLRATE MIN DURATION” to the “BUYRATE MIN DURATION” that wasloaded from the import file -

mysql> UPDATE cc_ratecard SET initblock = buyrateinitblock WHERE idtariffp

lan = 2;



and finally to set “SELLRATE BILLING BLOCK” to the “BUYRATE BILLING BLOCK” thatwas loaded from the import file -

mysql> UPDATE cc_ratecard SET billingblock = buyrateincrement WHERE idtari

ffplan = 2;





Now if we go and look at the rate we were looking at before it looks much better. The

billing increments are all the same and my sell rate it 20% more than my buy rate!

Now I just need to go to my call plan and remove the test rate card created earlier and add

my new callwithus rate card

getting started with a2billing

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