DataTechLabs - VoIP Billing, Hosted VoIP Billing, Switching and Routing Provider

ArrowBilling selfregistration module

Friday, 20 April 2007

This manual describes a very useful feature of DataTechLabs Arrow Billing. Users can register and use their accounts without any other manual intervention. That is why it is called Selfregistration. Once the administrator enables it and configures a few things, the users are able to enjoy the service provided by Arrow Billing. And this is all by themselves, not requiring help from others.

Enabling Selfregistration

To let the users register their own accounts, the administrator should enable the service first. Here are the steps to follow:

Go to the navigation menu item Tools.
Go to the submenu item Options.
In the section Enduser Interface, check the box Enable Selfregistration.

The portion of the page is shown below:

When you enable selfregistration, the users will find a link to register their accounts in the end-user login page. You can access the end-user page by appending users/ after billing/ in the URL for billing administrators (see the login page for end-users below). However, the users will not be able to register their accounts still. To help them do so, you need to create an account group in Arrow Billing.

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Creating Account Group

You can either create an account group manually or let the Batch Operations generate the account PINs in a group. But keep in mind that you need to add accounts by yourself to the group you create manually, whereas Batch Operations automatically take care of the accounts in the group. First let us use the automatic creation facility of account groups with Batch Operations.

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Automatic Creation

Here is the page you are likely to see:

Go to the main menu item Batch Operations. You will see the section Account PINs by default.
Generate account PINs in a group to be used for self registration. You can either keep the existing values or provide the values according to your requirements in the fields:
- Account Group (name for the group),
- Account Group Description (a brief description about the group),
- Number of Accounts (how many accounts need to be within the group),
- Credit Amount (the initial credit for each account with an option to select currency),
- Rate Table (the name of rate table to be used for accounts in the group),
- Expiration Date (the last day of the accounts being valid),
- Number of PIN Digits (how many digits need to be present in the account name with an option to specify the prefix digits for all accounts),
- Password (you can set the password of each account same as individual ID or you can randomly generate passwords for all with varying digits or you can type a fixed text to be used as password for all) and
- Serial Number (specify a serial number for the first account in the group, others will be assigned subsequent numbers).
Press the button Generate.

As a result, VOIP originating accounts will be created with sequential serial numbers and random account numbers. Initially the status of all accounts will be Disabled. Of course, you have the option to change the individual status of an account, but it will be really time consuming to do so for each account. Instead you can change the status of every account in the generated group with just a click of the mouse. To know how, you can skip the next subsection Manual Creation or you can read on.

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Manual Creation

If you do want to create account groups and assign inidividual accounts to them to be used for selfregistration, Arrow Billing will not disappoint you. Look at the figure below and follow the steps:

Go to the navigation menu item Account Groups.
Click the submenu item Add Account Group.
Provide a suitable name and description regarding your new group and hit the button Create Group.

Bear in mind that unlike the automatic creation of account groups, no account is added to your group by the system. You have to add each account to the group from the page Edit Account. Here are a few steps you can follow:

Go to main menu item Accounts.
In the Search Account page, provide necessary values in the required fields and press the button Search!.
Go to the editing page of a particular account by clicking the name of the account.
Select appropriate account group from the drop-down menu Account Group and click the button Edit Account.

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Changing Account Group Status

Just creating an account group is not enough for selfregistration. You have to change the status of individual accounts from Disabled to Available. An elegent way to do this is as follows:

Go to the navigation menu item Account Groups.
In the default page, click the name of the account group you created for selfregistration.
Now in Edit Account Group page, find the field Change Status and select available for self registration from the drop-down menu.

The page for editing account group is shown here:

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User Registration

When you click the link in the user login page, you are directed to the page shown below:

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Available Fields

First Name

In this text box, You should provide your first name.

Last Name

You may type your last name in this box.

Address

If you want, you can provide first portion of your address here.

Address (cont)

If you have a longer address, you can type the last part in this text field.

City

In case you want to mention your resident city, here is the place to do so.

Zip

Type the zip code of your place here.

Country

This is a drop-down menu containing the sorted list of countries in the world. Select yours from this menu.

Fax

This text box contains your fax number.

Email

In this text box, you have to provide your email address. Please note that 8 fields described above were optional, but this field is mendatory.

Verify Email

This is also a required field. Please mention your email address again to make sure you typed it correctly.

Choose Password

In this field, you have to type the access password for your account. Passwords should be 8 to 16 characters long.

Verify Password

You have to retype your access password in this field so that you are absolutely sure about it.

Register!

This is the submit button to press when you are done providing data in the fields and you want to register your account.

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Post Registration Screen

You will see the following page after registering your account successfully.

Please note that your username is a randomly-choosen account number from the groups of available accounts for selfregistration. You have to use the username and password shown in the page for login to the end-user interface until you change the password to a new one.

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User Interface

After login, the user will hopefully see the following menu to the left of the screen:

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General Info

This is the default page the user will be directed to after successful login attempt. The page is shown here:

As you can see from the figure, basic information about the account is displayed here.

Login Username, Calling Username and Calling Password are the same as the account number initially. The administrator can change Calling Username and Calling Password by going to the editing page of that particular account. The entry in the field Account/Number/Alias is shown in Calling Username, whereas the entry in the field Password is represented by the Calling Password.

The status of the account is initially Pending. When the administrator changes the status to any other value displayed in the drop-down menu of Account Status, the new value is shown here in the end-user interface. Apart from Pending, other status values that might be assigned to an account are: Enabled, Disabled and Available.

Current balance is the amount assigned during account creation. As there is no credit limit yet, available limit is still the same as current balance.

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Call Detail

This is the page for Call Detail.

Here you can generate report for call details during a particular day.

Available Fields

From Account

This is a drop-down menu specifying the account number you are using and another option All to indicate all the accounts from which calls were made in a particular day. If you just want to know about calls from your account, keep the default option. Otherwise choose the second one to get the datails of all the calls from all the accounts.

Report Date

This is a field for specifying a date for which you want to see detailed report of the calls. There are three drop-down menus here to indicate <day> <month> <year>. Select a particular day for your needs.

Generate Report

You should press this button when you are satisfied with the source account and the date.

Columns Displayed

The columns in the report are:

Date & Time: The date and time when the call was made.
Duration: The length of the call.
To N: The destination number to be called.
Description: A brief description.
Amount: The cost for the call.
Cur: The currency used in calculating the cost.

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Payments

Below is the page for Payments.

Available Fields

Payment Method

This is a drop-down menu containing a couple of payment methods for the user. You can either pay with Paypal or use a validation code for payment.

Proceed

When you have selected a method for payment, press this button to continue. If you have chosen the first option 'Paypal', you will be directed to a page showing the following screen: