provided by Star2Billing S.L.

Hello
Please forgive my ignorance I will try to explain as best I can.

I am very confused about how is the best way to have recurring service charges billed to a customer.

The system is completely closed - by which I mean the end users do not login to it for anything - it is purely setup for me to track and bill them for their usage. Customers are post-pay and this seems to be working at least for calls. An invoice is generated on the correct day for the customer.

I had setup some subscription service, and associated the account with the subscription through the 'subscribers' link. I had setup several items which each account subscribes to, for example user service at £30 per month, maintenance service for £6.73 per month, and DDI at £4 per month - so each account subscribed to at least 2 service.

Initially things seemed to work correctly - the first invoice on 2011-07-27 for the account ID1 showed as follows;
2011-06-28 CHARGE :Monthly service and maintenance fee (3 handsets, 1 incoming number) 42.18 20.00% 50.62
2011-07-27 Amount for period between the 2011-06-02 and 2011-07-27 29.02 20.00% 34.82

I can only think I must have put the £42.18 on as a charge rather than a recur service, I can't find it now.

I am using Sage for our invoicing so I transferred the details to sage and invoiced the customer, which they paid.

Question 1 - how do you tell A2B that the customer has paid you through whatever method isn't integrated - for example they paid by cheque (i have not setup paypal or anything else like that). Whatever I have done, I now have a refill for the correct amount listed under invoices, noting paid and this invoice also notes it is paid. When I manage payments, there is a payment assigned (ID 3) for the correct amount.

On the next billing cycle, the invoice shows only 1 line as follows;
2011-08-27 Amount for period between the 2011-07-28 and 2011-08-27 60.70 20.00% 72.83

Question 2 - how do I get a breakdown of where this number comes from? It seems to be the sum of their calls at £23.97+tax and £36.73+tax, which is the sum of the 2 subscription services this customer was subscribed to at this time (£30 and £6.73). Where did the £42.18+tax go to that was on the first invoice?

I have read somewhere about using cron for some things, and that certain items are only processed on the 1st of the month. Question 4 - which is which?

Question 5 - Now that the system has generated an invoice, is it possible to alter or re-generate it? The second billing run is clearly wrong, I have missed off a subscription for the DDI. How can I correct this?

I have looked around for documentation and had a quick search on the forum but I can't seem to find a definite answer.

Running A2Billing 1.9, Asterisk 1.6