Rate management manual

THE MANUAL ON THE RATE MANAGEMENT IS CURRENTLY BEING WRITTEN AND MAY NOT BE COMPLETE OR 100% UP TO DATE YET. PLEASE EXCUSE OUR DUST.

The Carriers table contains Customers and Vendors which you interconnect to. A carrier may be only a customer, only a vendor or a customer/vendor at the same time. You can assign a responsible Account manager to a carrier. He will receive email notifications for rate imports and amendments if configured. The Call Simulation button, the columns GWs, GW groups, Customer setup and Vendor setup links are intended for 5gVision Routing module.

The Rate plans table stores settings for all the rate plans in the system. If you open this module from the Vendor rates or Customer rates screen, then it contains the filter Vendor or !Vendor correspondingly, and you see only Vendor Rate plans or Customer Rate plans and Code decks. The table contains the following columns:

• Status - lets you easily enable/disable a rate plan.
• Rate plan name - enter a name of the rate plan.
• Comment - just a comment.
• Rate plan type - you can choose one of 3 types:
• Vendor - a rate plan containing rates received from vendors.
• Customer - a rate plan containing rates sent to customers. It's created on basis of a Code deck defined in the Customer plan Code deck column.
• Code deck - a special type of rate plans that contains only a code-area map and used as a template for Customer rate plans. (See more in the Code decks).
• Customer plan Code deck - a code deck used to form a customer rate plan.
• Currency - a currency used for the rate plan.
• Customer plan Parent Rate plan - a parent rate plan which takes effect if there is no a certain prefix in the current plan.
• Parent rate multiplic. - a multiplicator to apply to parent rate plan rates.
• Active from, GMT - date/time from which the rate plan is valid. If blank - the system will insert the current time.
• Active till, GMT - date/time till which the rate plan is valid. If blank - the plan is valid indefinitely.
• Active from Date template - a Date template used to set Active from date for rates automatically depending on Customer or Vendor changes.
• Contract Date template - a Date template to compare the dates as they should be by a Vendor contract for rates or codes changes with Active from dates in Vendor rate sheet.
• Count rates - count all rates in the rate plan.
• View rates - opens a floating table with the rate plan rates.
• Clear rates - delete all rate from the rate plan.
• Clone rates - clones rates to this rate plan. Cloned rates will replace the existing rates.
• Statistical object - choose a customer or a vendor in statistics corresponding to this Rate plan. This correspondence can be used then in Rate alerts.
• Last change, GMT - the last time when the rate plan was changed.

The Rate plan groups table allows you to create a logical group of rate plans in order to use it during the vendor import and the customer rate generation process.

A concept of Rate plan slices allows to separate the rate management and routing. A Rate plan slice is a part of a vendor Rate plan with certain codes or whole countries allowed/blocked. This way, if you are only buying 10 countries from a vendor, and are not interested in full A-Z, you may create a slice and use it in routing instead of a full Rate plan. Routing, thus, will look more elegant, you may implement very complex schemes with just 10-20 routes, as you wont need to set up routes (dialpeers) separately for each code or area. For instance, you may assign 50 Rate plan slices to just one route and do LCR among them. For each call, only the slices that have corresponding codes open will be chosen.

During rate management you may easily load the full Rate plan of the vendor to the system and be sure that only necessary rates will be used for termination.

There are 2 ways to apply restrictions to Rate plans in the Rate plan slices configuration: Code groups included/excluded and separate codes included/excluded. Code groups are configured in the corresponding module. Codes should contain comma-separated list of codes included/excluded in/from the Rate plan slice. "*" at the end means any digit after, for instance, 33 means all codes in France.

Rate plan slices can be used during the LCR1 and LCR2 reports generation.

Here you can create logical groups of codes which then may be applied to vendor Rate plans in the Rate plan slices configuration for including or excluding certain codes. When you start your configuration, at first you should create a code group in the upper table and only then include separate codes or child code groups to it in the bottom table.

Codes from code groups are used like a mask which overlaid with a Rate pan. For example, a Rate plan contains 33, 3312, 3398 codes, and a code group has 33, 3312. If a Rate plan slice formed by this Rate plan and only this code group then calls to the prefix 3398 won't pass. If you need to add a whole country to a slice and not to list all separate codes, you can use "*" at the end of the country code. For instance, 33* for France.

You can add codes to a code group right from the RateVend table using a context menu options Add selected to Code group and Add filtered to Code group.