Part of my job is to review help tickets received and try to identify trends as it relates to similar/common problems that CDR2Cloud user’s experience. I wanted to spend some time today talking about one feature that seems to stump many user and this is the Incremental Billing Length setting of a Rate Table.

Let’s first review a few things. To bill calls to a customer, you must first create the customer record, then create your rate table and lastly assign the rate table to the customer record. In some cases you are repeating this task for hundreds of customers and in others, just a handful of customers, however the process is the same. The Rate Table allows you to rate calls using many different models, such as a per minute basis: - using the call duration, a markup basis: - by simply applying a % markup factor to what your carrier charged you and a few others models which we won’t discuss in this article. When rating calls on a per minute basis, there are 4 very important Rate Table settings that you must pay very close attention. The settings are:

• Billing Initial Length
• Billing Incremental Length
• [Day/Eve/Night] Initial Charge
• [Day/Eve/Night] Incremental Charge

We will spend some time discussing the “Billing Incremental Length” setting as this seems to cause the most grief for CDR2Cloud users. Simply put, this setting allows you to define whether you would like to bill calls on a “per minute” basis or a “per second” basis. Similarly you may also have the need to bill calls on a “per 5 minute basis” or “per hour basis”, though not very common. By default this value is set to “60” which is 60 seconds and indicates a per minute basis. This means that the duration for every call will be rounded up to the next whole minute (60 seconds).

For example:

• If your {cdr} file reports a call as lasting 26 seconds, then your Rate Table will bill this call at 60 seconds (1 minute).
• If your {cdr} file reports a call as lasting 185 seconds, then your Rate Table will bill this call at 240 seconds (4 minutes).

If on the other hand, you would like to bill calls on a “per second” basis, then you would set the “Billing Incremental Length” to “1” which is 1 second. Now, there is no rounding up to the next minute and calls are billed by the second.

One thing to note is that the “Rate Pattern Summary / Customer” report may appear to be incorrect if your customer is assigned to a rate table which is not set to per second billing. This is because the “Total Duration” column will show total call duration with no rounding which will distort a values for a customer who is being charged on a “per minute” model.

For more information on Rate Table settings please see the Rate Table Online documentation.

Please send me an email (sgordon@svksoftware.com) if you have any questions or comments about this bolg post.