provided by Star2Billing S.L.

The issue is with the date in batch invoicing.

For instance, if the invoice day is set to 1 (first day of month) then ideally, the total amount on the generated invoice should be "total amount of all calls bewtween from 1-10-2009 00:00:00 to 31-10-2009 00:00:00.

However, when the cronjob ran at 1-11-2009 7:00 AM, the invoice included "total amount of all calls upto 1-11-2009 07:00AM". The calls made between 1-11-2009 00:00:01 to 1-11-2009 07:00:00 do not belong to this invoice but to the next months invoice.

hope you understand.


Thanks

Hi

Run the cronjob at midnight.

Joe

mid night is a busy time, and server gets overloaded.

i believe whatever time you choose to run it, the query shall always extract records from db, NOT going above midnight.

this is how all telcos provide you with bills, i.e. until midnight (when the date is changed then all calls after that belongs to the next month bill)

Thanks

In my experience, the large tier one telco's (Colt, Verizon, etc) invoice every available call at the time of running the report, and I think it is desirable for cash flow reasons to invoice everything you can invoice.

If the server is overloaded or close to overloaded at any point, then it may be a time to revisit the architecture, and do some optimisation.

If running the invoices cronjob at the time that you want the invoices produced is not a pragmatic solution, then you would have to hack about in the code.

Joe

Upgrading the server is not very ideal solution for generating invoices.

Hacking in the code is a good solution. Also, I believe this should be implemented in the main trunk as this should always be the default behaviour of invoicing (i.e. do not include calls after 12:00 AM as the date has now been changed.)


Thanks.

You inferred that I said you needed to upgrade your platform to generate invoices - What I said that if your server was close to overloaded, you should consider an upgrade. In the server world, the general rule of thumb is that when the server is at 50% capacity, double the capacity.

I would stand by my earlier comment, that you should be billing everything you can bill. You've paid, or have got to pay for the minutes, and with thousands of customers, the "opportunity cost" could be huge.

Many customers can be in different timezones, So do you go to the degree of looking at the customer's timezone to decide what CDR to bill? I'd say not - keep it simple, and bill everything.

The your issue can easily be fixed by changing the time of the cronjob, IMO, your traffic patterns are unusual to be so busy at Midnight, that you cannot run the invoice cronjob without potentially affecting the operation of your platform.

Given that this is a minor issue, really only applicable to you, as far as I can make out, I would not be recommending that this be put top of the priority list, there are plenty of other things to do. If it is an issue, and important to you, then you have the option of sponsoring the development of this feature.

Joe