The first step when setting up billing data is to create a billing profile, which will be the container for all other billing related data. Go to System Administration→Billing and click on create new billing profile. You will be taken to a web form where you may enter the following parameters (all values except handle and name may be left empty):

To set up billing fees, go to System Administration→Billing and select edit fees next to the billing profile you want to configure. Billing fees may be uploaded using a configurable CSV file format, or entered directly via the web interface by selecting create new entry just below Stored Billing Fees. To configure the CSV field order for the file upload, rearrange the entries in the www_admin→fees_csv→element_order array in /etc/ngcp-config/config.yml and execute the command ngcpcfg apply. For input via the web interface, just fill in the text fields accordingly. In both cases, the following information may be specified independently for every destination:

	The destination needs to be unique for a billing profile. The system will return an error if a destination is specified twice, both for the file upload and the input via the web interface.

There are several internal services (vsc, conference, voicebox) which will need a specific destination entry with a domain-based destination. If you don’t want to charge the same (or nothing) for those services, add a fee for destination ^.*@.+\.local$ there. If you want to charge different amounts for those services, break it down into separate fee entries for ^.*@vsc\.local$, ^.*@conference\.local$ and ^.*@voicebox\.local$ with the according fees. NOT CREATING EITHER THE CATCH-ALL FEE OR THE SEPARATE FEES FOR THE .local DOMAIN WILL BREAK YOUR RATING PROCESS!

To be able to differentiate between on-peak and off-peak calls, the platform stores off-peak times for every billing profile based on weekdays and/or calendar days. To edit the settings for a billing profile, go to System Administration→Billing and select edit peak times next to the billing profile you want to configure.

To set off-peak times for a weekday, click on edit next to the according weekday. You will be presented with two input fields which both receive a timestamp in the form of hh:mm:ss specifying a time of day for the start and end of the off-peak period. If any of the fields is left empty, the system will automatically insert 00:00:00 (start field) or 23:59:59 (end field). Click on save to store the setting in the database. You may create more than one off-peak period per weekday, and you may edit existing entries using any of the input fields and clicking save next to it. To completely delete a range, just select delete next to the entry.

To specify off-peak ranges based on calendar dates, click on add new date just below Dates. Enter a date in the form of YYYY-MM-DD into the date input field and fill in the start and end timestamps as outlined above. Select save to store the entry, or cancel to close the input form. Existing dates will be listed below, grouped by year. Click on any of the years to view all dates which have been recorded for it. If an entry is added, the corresponding year is expanded automatically. If an already existing date is added, it will overwrite the existing entry.

The NGCP supports a fraud detection feature, which is designed to detect accounts causing unusually high customer costs, and then to perform one of several actions upon those accounts. This feature can be enabled and configured through three billing profile options described in Section 7.1.1, “Creating Billing Profiles”, namely fraud limit, fraud lock and fraud notify.

Once a day, shortly after midnight local time, a background script automatically sifts through all accounts which are linked to a billing profile enabled for fraud detection, and selects those which have caused a higher cost than the fraud limit configured in the billing profile, within the currently active billing interval (e.g. in the current month). It then proceeds to perform at least one of the following actions on those accounts:

	Accounts that were automatically locked by the fraud detection feature will not be automatically unlocked when the next billing interval starts. This has to be done manually through the administration panel or through the provisioning interface.

If fraud detection is configured to only send an email and not lock the affected accounts, it will continue to do so for over-limit accounts every day. The accounts must either be locked in order to stop the emails (only currently active accounts are considered when the script looks for over-limit accounts) or some other action to resolve the conflict must be taken, such as disabling fraud detection for those accounts.

In order to be able to easily identify billing files, the file name is constructed by the following fixed-length fields:

<prefix><separator><version><separator><timestamp><separator><sequence number><suffix>

The definition of the specific fields is as follows:

A valid example filename for a billing file created at 2012-03-10 14:30:00 and being the 42nd file exported by the system, is:

sipwise_004_20120310143000_0000000042.cdr

Each billing file consists of three parts: one header line, zero to 5000 body lines and one trailer line.

<version>,<number of records>

004,0738

  '2055','2007-11-07 11:36:49','6b6977f9-6125-4339-a82c-3c5af04652d2','1',
's12345','42','c2468','23','test','sipwise.com','43720456700','0','0','3',,
'0',,'0','4315551234','192.168.101.17','4315551234','sipwise.com',,,'call',
'ok','200','2007-11-05 16:17:33.517','2007-11-05 16:17:37.641','74.731',
'7F2A3EA-47F348E84@192.168.101.9','ok','2007-11-07 11:36:49','9.25','16.03',
'national landline','national landline','landline vienna','landline vienna',
'015551234','0','0'

<md5 sum>

#!/bin/sh

error() { echo $@; exit 1; }
test -n "$1" || error "Usage: $0 <cdr-file>"
test -f "$1" || error "File '$1' not found"

TMPFILE="/tmp/$(basename "$1")"
MD5="$(sed -rn '$ s/^([a-z0-9]{32}).*$/\1/i p' "$1")  $TMPFILE"
sed '$d' "$1" > "$TMPFILE"
echo "$MD5" | md5sum -c -
rm -f "$TMPFILE"

$ ./cdr-md5.sh sipwise_001_20071110123000_0000000004.cdr
/tmp/sipwise_001_20071110123000_0000000004.cdr: OK

$ ./cdr-md5.sh sipwise_001_20071110123000_0000000004.cdr
/tmp/sipwise_001_20071110123000_0000000004.cdr: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match

Billing files are created twice per hour at minutes 25 and 55 and are stored in the home directory of the cdrexport user. If the amount of records within the transmission interval exceeds the threshold of 5000 records per file, multiple billing files are created. If no billing records are found for an interval, a billing file without body data is constructed for easy detection of lost billing files on the 3rd party side.

CDR files are fetched by a 3rd party billing system using SFTP or SCP with either public key or password authentication using the username cdrexport. If public key authentication is chosen, the public key file has to be stored in the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 below the home directory of the cdrexport user. Otherwise, a password has to be set for the user.

The 3rd party billing system is responsible for deleting CDR files after fetching them.

	The cdrexport user is kept in a jailed environment on the system, so it has only access to a very limited set of commandline utilities.