Products

Name conventions

Short introduction

1. you can create your list of products (which can be devices or services)
2. a product of type internet (colloquially also called tariff, if it's not a device) requires a QoS rule (i.e. a data rate)
3. you link your customers to the products via assigning products to contracts
4. we then call the product (which is now linked to the contract) an item

Important dependencies

The following designations are important regarding program design (of NMS Prime) and communication between ISP and their customers:

• network access
• QoS / data rates
• tariff / maturity (runtime)

By now, please also refer to the module chart.

Runtime / Maturity

You can add a minimum and a general maturity to all so called tariffs (a product of type 'Internet', 'Voip' or 'TV'). A contracts end of term shown on the invoice after executing the settlement run is determined by the assigned item. If you have multiple items with different types (and valid dates !) assigned to the customer the following order takes precedence:

1. Internet
2. Voip
3. TV

So if there's a customer only having a Voip tariff (no internet) the maturity of the corresonding Voip product is used to determine the contracts end of term.

It's important to say that if the Internet item is bundled with a Voip item and the Voip item was added after the Internet item then the Voip items maturity is used to determine the contracts end of term.

The TV item is only used if the customer neither has a Internet nor a Voip item.

Yearly charged Products

How to setup when a product with yearly billing cycle (charged once in a year) will be charged.

You have to select the month (numerated from 1 to 12) in a CostCenter. Then you can select the CostCenter in the Contract or in the Product. The following two examples explain how it is handled:

1. Contracts CostCenter has 'Month to create bill' = 5. All products assigned to that contract (=items (german: Posten)) that do not have a CostCenter assigned will be charged in may.

2. Contracts CostCenter has 'Month to create bill' = 5. The customer has 2 yearly charged items. One of that has a CostCenter selected that has 'Month to create bill' = 10. So one item will be charged in may and the other one in october.

Overview of billing/payroll cycles (german)