metering and other

[Ivan Kohler]

On Sun, Feb 28, 1999 at 09:19:26AM -0800, Clayton Gray wrote:
> I'm looking at the freeside and I have a few questions;
> How will I handle Canadian Postal Codes? eg. V2M 6M8

I thought I'd had that internationialized but I neglected to allow spaces. 
Sorry about that.  Just checked the fix into CVS for you. 

> Can freeside bill for metered accounts?

The short version: Yes, you need to import the metering data into SQL.
The long vesion I sent to someone who asked about this privately:

    I'm hoping Freeside can support arbitrailly complex pricing plans
    because of a simple concept: all prices are perl expressions.  So if
    you use `19.95' for example, perl evalates that to be `19.95'.  But if
    you need to do a complex pricing scheme, you just need to write an
    appropriate perl expression, which will most likely pull data from the
    database to return pricing.  Some things will already log to SQL; for
    example most RADIUS servers can or have a patch available.  Getting
    Freeside to bill based on any sort of data then becomes a matter of
    importing the data into the database.

    There are some issues involved with pro-rating, partial month charges,
    that sort of thing.  Expressions will need a standard way to have the
    applicable time/data ranges passed to them.  Also the expressions are
    current running under the Safe perl module, and the opmask might not
    be right in all situations.  I'll try to spend some time working on
    this if you are using it. 

> I'm currently using Hurlnet & Mysql.
> Would you be available to write the script to convert the data?

Sure, but that's more appropriately discussed off-list.

> From the demo I can't tell what kind of history is keep of each
> customer.
> Is it debits and credits and comments?

Yes, all charges and credits (and payments and refunds) are kept as
history.  You can enter comments when doing credits which are kept in the
history with that credit.  There isn't a general comments area (yet). 

-- 
Ivan Kohler <ivan at sisd.com> - finger for PGP key - <moc.dsis at navi> Relhok Navi
Open-source billing and administration for ISPs - http://www.sisd.com/freeside
20 4,16 * * * saytime # please don't be surprised if you find me dreaming too