Destination Rates

A Destination rate groups some prefixes with their cost details.

They only have two fields:

Name
Name to reference the destination rate
Description
Additional details
Currency
All rates imported/added will use this currency

Truco

Destination rate names are not shown to the final client, you can use whatever makes sense to you.

Add rates manually

Brand operator can add rates by hand, filling these fields (List of rates subsection):

Destination
Pre-created destination that specifies a concrete prefix.
Connection fee
The amount that is charged just for call establishment.
Interval start
When should the billing engine start rating the calls. If you set it to 10, first 10 seconds will be for free.
Per minute rate
Price per minute of conversation.
Charge period
Increase cost every seconds? Or in 10 second intervals? Or every minute?

Nota

A call with less duration that the one defined in interval start will have the price of the Connection fee.

Advertencia

All decimals must use point as decimal delimiter. 4 decimals precision is used.

How it works

Call cost/price is increased by (Per minute rate / 60 ) * charge period every charge period seconds:

  • If billing period is set to 1, every second the price will be increased price per minute divided by 60 (bill by seconds).
  • If billing period is set to 60, every minute the price will be increased price per minute (bill by minutes).

Importing a CSV file

At this point, the brand operator may have noticed that adding thousands of rates would be a really annoying and time consuming task, as there are 254 countries, each of them with their mobile networks, landline networks, special service numbers, etc.

That’s why the creation of destination rates is done using a CSV file.

The first step is creating an empty Destination rate to import the prices in and using Import rates option.

We can select which column contains which field, in case we want to import a CSV file in a non-recommended format. We can also decide whether to import the first line or discard it as it may have titles instead of data.

Consejo

The importing process is done in background, letting the brand operator continue doing other stuff while it is finished.

CSV format

Although the import window allows importing non-recommended format CSV files, we encourage you to import a file in the proposed format, as it will make this process much easier.

You can find a sample CSV for importing here.

The order of the columns should be:

  • Destination name
  • Destination prefix (E.164 with + sign)
  • Per minute charge
  • Establishment cost
  • Billing period in seconds

Nota

It is recommended to double quote alphanumeric entries, though it is not compulsory for single word entries (or entries without odd symbols). If they contain any comma, they MUST be quoted.

Error

Floating numbers MUST use point as decimal separator.

Nota

Numeric entries can be quoted with double quotes, but it is not mandatory.

You can download the imported file of the destination rate. Take into account that while importing over existing data, the matching values are overwritten and the not matching are kept. This allows downloading the imported file, changing some values and importing pricing back.

Nota

When re-importing, non-existent prefixes are kept.

Once the import process is over, we only have to include this destination rate into some rating plan and bind it to the clients we want following the procedure explained in Rating plans.