Freeside Reports and other issues

[Tim Jung]

I have been playing with the newest version of Freeside as I am looking to
switch from Rodopi to Freeside. Anyone out there switched from Rodopi to
Freeside?

Here is a list of some of the reports that I don't see included with Freeside
that I feel should be included by default.

Cash Receipts - List your cash receipts by dates given (similar to how the
credit card receipts financial reports work)
Sales Report - List all your sales within a given set of dates (same format as
above)
Credit Memos Detail - I feel it should show the list of individual credits as
well as the totals (it only shows total now)
Online Hours Report - I would like to see a report in the users record were you
can list/print them by a set dates.
Online Web Usage - I would like to see a report for the amount of traffic for a
web site by a set of dates.


I would also like to see a list of various standardize customer credit fields. I
mean I would like to be able to print reports for "bad debt write-offs" and
"customer good-will" and various standard things, and customizable things like
that. I know it would seem this is more of an accounting program function but I
would rather just import the totals into an accounting program and thus need to
be able to break down the credits categories to be imported in the accounting
program.

I didn't see anywhere where I might be able to put in Freeside for it to import
Apache web logs to do billing based on if a customer goes over their allotted
amount of transfers in a given period of time. Is this in there, and if so where
is it? I seemed to have missed the Apache log import if it is there.

I would also like to see an export added for LDAP. I know I could just call some
LDAP scripts using the export "shellcommands" but having LDAP support built-in
would be a nice feature, especially since you can now install Red Hat 7.2 and
Red Hat 7.3 to use LDAP authentication by default on new installs now (X-Windows
installs only right now).

I would also like to eventually see the option of emailing customers either text
based invoices (which is what Freeside has now) or HTML invoices. I would like
to send HTML invoices (which we do now) so that it is formatted in a nice
pleasant format and would be able to include our company logo on it kind of like
letter head type stuff, so it would match what we are sending in the US mail
system. This is how we prefer to send emailed invoices right now.

I would also like to see the option to set a don't suspend this customer until
after date X. I would also like to see an option to set a don't suspend customer
if their past due account balance is less than X amount. This would allow us to
extend a customer's grace period for payment if they call and explain a problem
they are having and we want to give them more time to send in a payment before
the system automatically suspends them for non-payment. It would also allow us
to set say a specific corporate account to not be suspended because they are a
late pay but consistent pay. We see this kind of issue with government groups
that we work with, they usually don't pay on the exact date we want but we
always get consistently paid a week or two later, depending on which government
group it is we are discussing.

Let me know what some of the rest of you think about these things.

Tim Jung
System Admin
Internet Gateway Inc.
tjung at igateway.net