On-demand DID provisioning for resellers

This chapter demonstrates how to configure a DID World Wide supplier vendor and set pricing parameters for DID usage. This will allow your reseller’s customer to pick a number belonging to the desired country/city from the inventory of DID or toll-free numbers available on the DID vendor side and then assign the number to one of his phone lines.

Please refer to the PortaBilling Help for detailed instructions on how to navigate and operate the web interface, as well as for detailed explanations of particular fields.

1. Operations to be performed by an administrator
   • Create pricing batch for reseller
   • Assign the pricing DID batch to the reseller
2. Actions to be performed by a reseller
   • Log in to the reseller self-care interface
   • Create a pricing DID batch for a customer
   • Assign the pricing DID batch to the customer
   • Provision DIDs

The pricing DID batches are sets of pricing parameters to be applied to different customer groups for DID usage (e.g., you may want to charge your resellers differently from your retail customers for DID usage).

1. On the DID/MSISDN inventory panel, select Pricing batches.
2. Click + Batch and fill in the pricing batch details:
   • Name – type in a short name for the pricing batch.
   • Applied to – specify Reseller.
   • Type  – select On-demand from external vendor.
   • Vendor – select the vendor providing DID numbers for this batch (DIDWW in this example).
   • Pricing – select Billable and define the pricing parameters:
     • Currency – select the currency in which you will charge for DID usage. Note that this batch can be assigned only to resellers who use the same currency.
     • Additional activation fee – specify a configurable fixed amount that is charged at allocation of a new number in addition to the DID provider’s activation fee.
     • Additional recurring fee – specify a configurable fixed amount that is always included in the recurring (monthly) charge.
     • Recurring fee markup – specify a configurable increase of the DID cost (charged by the DID provider) included in the recurring charge in addition to the actual DID cost.
     • Rounding precision – specify the rounding pattern to obtain “marketable” figures. This will specify the last “pre-set” digits in the figure.

       

3. Click Save.

1. On the navigation menu, select Sales > Resellers.
2. On the Reseller panel, select General info.
3. On the General info panel, select the Additional info tab.
4. In the Additional information section, select the reseller pricing batch for Auto-provision DIDs via batch option.

   

5. Click Save.

Open the reseller self-care page in a browser (by default https://<your-porta-billing-server-name>:8442) and log in with the credentials that were provided to you.

To charge your customers for DID number usage, it is necessary to create the corresponding pricing batch.

1. On the navigation menu, select Infrastructure > DID/MSISDN inventory.
2. On the DID/MSISDN inventory page, go to the Pricing batches tab.
3. Click + Batch and fill in the pricing batch details:
   • Name – type in a short name for the pricing batch.
   • Applied to – select Customer, since this is the batch that will be used for charging customers.
   • Type – select Inventoried.
   • Pricing – select Billable and define the pricing parameters:
     • Currency – select the currency to be charged for DID usage. Note that this batch can only be assigned to customers who use the same currency.
     • Additional activation fee  – specify a configurable fixed amount that is charged upon allocation of a new number in addition to the DID provider’s activation fee.
     • Additional recurring fee  – specify a configurable fixed amount that is always included in the recurring (monthly) charge.
     • Recurring fee markup  – specify a configurable increase of the DID cost (charged by the DID provider) included in the recurring charge in addition to the actual DID cost.
     • Rounding precision  – specify the rounding pattern to obtain “marketable” figures. This will specify the last “pre-set” digits in the figure.

       

4. Click the Save.

A customer will be able to browse the complete inventory of DID or toll-free numbers available on the DID vendor side, online. When he picks a number, the sign-up process on the PortaSwitch side will reserve and allocate that number on the DID provider side and provision it inside of PortaSwitch (e.g., as an alias to an existing account). When the customer decides that he no longer needs the number (or changes the number to something else), the reverse procedure will happen – the number will be released on the DID provider side and the account/alias will be removed in PortaBilling.

1. On the customer’s Additional Info tab select a previously created pricing batch in the Auto-provision DIDs via Batch list.
   You can select the pricing batches only with specified pricing parameters (not the Free of charge) from the Auto-provision DIDs via Batch list.

   

2. Click Save.

Once you assigned a batch for DID auto-provisioning, DID numbers can be provisioned on the DID provider side for this customer. This is usually done by a customer himself.