Freeside:4:Documentation:Administrator:Fees

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Revision as of 14:08, 27 February 2014 by Mark (talk | contribs) (Overview)

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Overview

  • Fees are charges automatically added to a customer's invoice based on some set of conditions.
  • Unlike Freeside's traditional "one-time charges", charging a fee doesn't create a persistent package definition or a package on the customer's account.
  • A fee definition can be a flat amount (e.g. a postal invoice fee) or a percentage of an invoice amount (e.g. a finance charge).
    • The fee can also be defined based on usage (CDRs), as either a flat amount per call or a percentage of rated price. These can be set independently for each usage class (local, intrastate, etc.).
  • The event that generates a fee can be an invoice event to charge the fee based on an existing invoice, or it can be a customer event to charge it on the customer's next invoice.

Configuration

First, create the fee definition itself.

  • Under Configuration -> Users, add the "Edit fee definitions" access right to your user account.
  • Open Configuration -> Packages -> Fees, and click "Add a new fee definition" at the top.
  • Set the fee's properties:
    • Description on the invoice. If you have multiple customer languages available, you will need a description for each one.
    • Comment (optional, for internal use)
    • The agent who will use this fee definition
    • Package class, for reporting purposes
    • Whether to treat the fee as "setup" or "recurring", again, for reporting purposes
    • The flat amount to charge
    • The percentage of the invoice amount to charge, and whether that's the percentage of the gross amount of the invoice or the unpaid balance.
    • Minimum and maximum values of the fee (optional). Note that the maximum will be adjusted to allow for any taxes that apply.
    • Whether to limit the fee to the customer's credit balance. (This is not generally useful.)
    • Whether the fee is taxable, and what tax class or product category it falls into.
  • Submit the form.

Then create an event that determines when the fee should be charged.

  • Open Configuration -> Billing -> Billing events, and click "Add a new event".
  • To charge a flat fee each time the customer is billed, or based on a percentage of the customer's current invoice amount:
    • Set Type = "Customer".
    • Set Action = "Charge a fee based on the customer's current invoice."
    • Set any conditions that limit which customers should be charged the fee, such as agent, customer class, or current balance.
  • To charge a flat or percentage fee based on previous outstanding invoices:
    • Set Type = "Invoice".
    • Set Action = "Charge a fee based on this invoice."
    • Set any conditions that limit the invoices that should be charged for, such as invoice age and balance due.
  • In the action parameters section, choose the fee definition you created.

Examples

(coming soon)