Customer billing

[luka]

I have seen here many people using staros, even some with several thousands of customers and many access points. I am wondering what accounting/billing solutions you use?

I am now in midle of developing customer control panel for our small local network and recently got idea to make it possible to be used by other customers/networks too. This would require to recode some things and make code cleaner and better usable.
That effort would be useless if just several people would use it so I am wondering too is there any need or interest in this system?

[Skaught]

We wrote our own system from the ground up using PHP/MySQL.

[torjon]

Try http://lms.rulez.pl/?lang=en

[Steve]

LMS has the most potential of any billing package I've seen. It really is a great start to full featured accounting package that has the features an ISP needs.

From their homepage:

"LMS" (LAN Management System) is the integrated system of networks management designed for various size internet providers (ISP).

That software writed in PHP, Perl and C, works with variuos database systems. It consists a friendly web user interface (frontend) and programs installed on servers (backend). The main features of LMS are:

- internet access administration (e.g. traffic control and stats),
- finances with invoicing (automatic billing),
- database of customers and network devices (network map),
- serial mailing and administration messages to customers,
- hosting and accounts management,
- bug tracking system (helpdesk),
- any services management,
- time organizer (timetable),
- customer web panel.

LMS is opensource application (licensed on GNU/GPL), so you are free to use it without any charges!


After installing it and poking around it for a day, it seems it is missing several features that will probably make it unusable for most ISP's:

- no credit card processing
- no ui for managing credit card information
- no way to pro-rate a monthly charge

I'm sure there are others as well. The upside is it is GPL, php, mysql, C and perl. Five of my favorite things. I've looked thru quite a bit of the code and it is well written. I don't think it would take a lot to add on to it. Downside is the developers are Polish and I think communication would make it difficult at best to contribute to the existing effort.

I'll probably spin this off on my own and start adding what I need. Any decent programmers out there feel up to joining in on the fun? PM me.

[luka]

Hello and thanks for this link! I was searching before for similar opensource wisp applications and havent found anything which may be close to LMS. There is also lack of good os software for hosting companies, too. Btw I like virtual bus simulation found on the same site :)

LMS is really great software, I have installed it and checked on local machine, but there are some things which dont feet in our perspective/organisation. First one is that it seems it is intended more to be installed on gateway machine and has no support for things like pppoe and similar. Ofcourse, it can be added there.
CC processing for me is the least important thing as in my country ccs are available for <10% of people and it is not possible to get merchant account :(

For our use, there are not much features needed. The first thing is that we plan to run this control panel on machine which is not gateway or similar. It should collect ip traffic info from access points as we differentiate local from internet traffic. There is also need for it to be able to communicate with radius server, ie doing basic things like opening new accounts, disabling account, speed adjustments etc, for main server.

Another option is that it should work with rrd instead of some mysql/pgsql traffic collections which are not great solutions, at least for me. Rrd is flexible and produces less cpu/disk load than mysql. Adobe svg is nice graphic representation, it may be used there too.
I also need things which will communicate with access points and periodically check other options, like users signal strengths, air rates, packet rates, possible interference and so on in order to prevent some accidents. Currently with staros there are very limited chances for that, but hope v3 will have such extensions.

I do have nothing against gpl, I like it, but maybe in my case it is not much appreciated idea as I am not decent programmer and more preffer timeframes than code quality :)

[ninedd]

in my country ccs are available for <10% of people and it is not possible to get merchant account :(What country are you in? We use InternetSecure.com and they list merchants in Aruba, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, New Zeland, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom & Venezuala (plus of course USA and Canada).

They are also (relatively) easy to get a Merchant account, since they use a 8% ''Rolling Reserve''. This means they hold 8% of every transaction for 6 months so that reduces the risk they face for any fraud or chargeback that happen, and they can therefor be more flexible on who they approve.

[luka]

What country are you in? We use InternetSecure.com ..
They are also (relatively) easy to get a Merchant account, since they use a 8% ''Rolling Reserve''. This means they hold 8% of every transaction for 6 months so that reduces the risk they face for any fraud or chargeback that happen, and they can therefor be more flexible on who they approve.

I am from Srpska/Bosnia. Considered other options before and generally we dont need it now as maybe 3-4 of our clients have credit card. I suppose this or next year things will change and more people will be able to have ccs. Btw we are not like Africa, this is just because of communism and war we had suffered on :)