So we’ve created a trunk to make calls through here, we’ve created a ratecard and call plan here and we’ve created an access phone number here so we’re finally ready to create a customer!

Creating a calling card customer

Click on CUSTOMERS on the left hand menu

Click Create Customers

We get a big list of options but the only things we need to set are -

BALANCE – set the inital balance for the customer

CALL PLAN – ensure the call plan is set to the one we created here

LASTNAME & FIRSTNAME – not required but definitely useful!

Then click on CONFIRM DATA

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing — Part 4 Creating a customer and making a call’ »

Now we’ve got a trunk setup and a rate card and call plan we need a way for our potential customers to actually connect to our system! One way for them to do this is via an access phone number. To test this I’m going to use the IPKall DID we setup here in FreePBX.

This assumes that FreePBX has been setup with some a2billing custom destinations as described here – http://www.freepbx.org/forum/freepbx/installation/inbound-sip-trunk-doesnt-call-extensions. Sysadminman VOIP VPSs are preconfigured for this.

Setting the inbound access number (DID) in FreePBX

This is changing the access DID we created here

In FreePBX click on Inbound Routes on the left hand main menu

Then select “ipkall” (the DID we created here)

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing — Part 3 Creating an access DID’ »

After we’ve created a trunk we need to create a ratecard and assign it to a call plan. This is the main part of the billing application and also the most complicated!

Initially I’m just going to create a ratecard that allows calls Leicester in the UK. The dialling code for Leicester is 0116 so the international prefix would be 44116  (44 being for the UK)

Creating a Ratecard

First click on the RATECARD menu on the left hand side of the screen

Then give your ratecard a name. I called mine “test-rate-card”

Assign the ratecard to use the trunk we created here

And click on CONFIRM DATA

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing — Part 2 Ratecards and Call Plans’ »

In this series of articles I’m going to run through how to get up your a2billing system up and running.  A2billing is an opensource billing application for Asterisk and can be used in many different ways – I’ll be documenting just some examples 

Some of this setup will depend how you have your main configuration file (/etc/asterisk/a2billing.conf) configured. I will not be discussing that here. Also some of the setup may rely on FreePBX and A2billing being setup to work together.

All of this documentation was created on a sysadminman Asterisk/FreePBX/A2billing VPS. See here for details – http://sysadminman.net/uk-voip-vps.html

Setting up a trunk

We need to setup a trunk to be used for our outbound calls. Obviously you can setup more than one trunk and route calls to different destinations via different trunks.

I will be using the trunk that I configured in FreePBX here – http://sysadminman.net/blog/archives/335. As the main settings for the trunk have been setup in FreePBX we can just call the trunk by it’s name in A2Billing. This trunk is with a provider called callwithus.

To setup a trunk -

Click on TRUNK on the left hand main menu

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing — Part 1 Setting up a trunk’ »