New Feature: Usage Tab

Express users should notice a new Usage tab in vPanel.

It shows the following:

1) Usage Current Period

2) Billable Usage For Current Period

3) Cost of Billable Usage

As an example, if your plan includes 100 minutes and you used 300, you would see 300 for Usage and 200 for Billable Usage.

Usage: 300
(Included: 100)
Billable: 200

All included usage is calculated based on a calendar month. The first month is not prorated.

We will periodically settle your account. By default, this will happen the first week of each calendar month (charging for the previous month).

We've not billed for overages at this point (congratulations if you got any free service there), but will begin billing for usage starting this month (billed first week in February).

If you exceed your allotted minutes generate overages, you must have valid payment information on file. If you do not, your account may be subject to suspension at our discretion.

One thing I noticed we need to fix is to make it not include fax numbers in this mix. They're currently showing with 0 usage and will be removed completely since overages do not apply to them.

Could this also be enabled for BYOD Residential users ? Since we are limited to 3000 mins, I would like to keep track.

I'd still like to see the current month usage displayed somewhere in the "Local Numbers" tab . I guess I use that page frequently since I tend to re-target destinations for some numbers now and then. The more numbers in use the easier to spot usage problems in one location and perhaps make adjustments.

Tim, did you figure out if you were going to allow SIP forwarding to be separate from POTS forwarding ? Meaning if you were going to charge for minutes used if forwarding to a SIP address.

Also, is forwarding an Express number to a Residential account going to incur overage fees since it's a voipo to voipo call ? Will it matter if it's forwarded via SIP address or by DID ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Montano

Tim, did you figure out if you were going to allow SIP forwarding to be separate from POTS forwarding ? Meaning if you were going to charge for minutes used if forwarding to a SIP address.

Also, is forwarding an Express number to a Residential account going to incur overage fees since it's a voipo to voipo call ? Will it matter if it's forwarded via SIP address or by DID ?

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For the time being, no. People are getting very confused by even offering the Express local numbers so we may have to phase that out of the mainstream offerings and look into doing something secondary with it if we continue to offer it to new customers. So right now, we're not planning to make any changes in terms of separating PSTN/SIP, sorry.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gbh2o

I'd still like to see the current month usage displayed somewhere in the "Local Numbers" tab . I guess I use that page frequently since I tend to re-target destinations for some numbers now and then. The more numbers in use the easier to spot usage problems in one location and perhaps make adjustments.

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Yeah, we'll be re-working the design of vPanel pretty soon to simplify and intergrate billing more tightly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zcnkac

Could this also be enabled for BYOD Residential users ? Since we are limited to 3000 mins, I would like to keep track.

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Right now, usage is not tracked in the same way for residential accounts. The monitoring for that is more pattern-based than minute-based and is basically all manually reviewed if something is flagged. The limit is there more to give people a guideline to keep in mind since BYOD opens up a lot of possibilities.

Will forwarding to a residential account incur overage charges ? If so, I may have to get rid of my Express numbers. Forwarding via SIP URI has always been free.

Tim, can you please verify if Voipo to Voipo calls are free ? More specifically if forwarding an Express number to a Residential numbers is free.

Thanks