Prepaid and Postpaid Balance Management¶

When dealing in telephony business, it's great to have reliable partners (customers, providers or users). You can always trust them and you always know that they will pay for the bill. They can be post billed.

But sometimes they can not be trusted. In that case you must apply prepaid billing scheme for them. Fortunately, Streamco Smartswitch supports both prepaid and postpaid billing schemes and even more.

In Streamco Smartswitch the billing scheme concept in implemented in the balance management. Generally speaking, balance is the difference between the amount of money, that was paid, and the billed amount of service that was used. There can be 2 types of balances:

• inbound. This is the difference between amount, that was paid to us by the telephony traffic originator, and the billed amount of traffic, that was originated on us.

• outbound. This is the difference between amount, that was paid by us to telephony traffic terminator, and the billed amount of telephony traffic, that was terminated on him.

As the traffic flows and bills, balances are updated accordingly in the real-time mode.

Every company/user in the system has its individual balance.

To configure specific billing scheme on them we must use the balance cutoff parameter. This parameter determines conditions, when we should cut off all the traffic from/to this company/user. Sure, basing on its balance, as the parameter's name stands. There can be following options of balance cutoff:

• inbound. Traffic is cut off when inbound balance becomes non-positive. This is the application of the prepaid scheme in case we terminate traffic for someone. The system will not route the calls that are not paid for by traffic originator.

• outbound. Traffic is cut off when outbound balance becomes non-positive. This is the application of the prepaid scheme in case we originate traffic to someone. The system will not send the calls that we didn't pay for to traffic terminator.

• mutual. This is the most interesting option. Let's suppose that we deal with the company in both directions. We originated calls to some destinations on them and terminate calls to some destinations for them. In this situation we can manage mutual balance. It is calculated as the difference between the outbound balance and the inbound balance. Traffic, that was originated to us, will be cut off if the value of mutual balance becomes non-positive. But when it becomes positive again, the traffic will be routed.

If no balance cutoff option is used - that is equivalent to applying the postpaid billing scheme.

Currently 2 applications deal with balances in the system - Softswitch and Calling Cards.