Billing from the ground up

Before we get started, here's what's happening at Call Theory this week:

Office Hours

A weekly meeting with Call Theory and fellow customers to learn, ask questions, and network over general IT, call center, and Amtelco topics.

• Tuesday, 9/24 @ 3pm Eastern
• Zoom Link and additional information
• Fallback Topics - Billing stats/formulas (expect this for a while)

Scripting Sessions

A weekly meeting to train Amtelco Intelligent Series scripting topics from Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced topics on a repeating schedule.

• Thursday, 9/26 @ 12pm Eastern
• Zoom Link and additional information
• Training Topics - Basic II: Fields, Logic, and Advanced Expressions

The Billing Journey

We've finalized a few items relating to our decision to work on an Amtelco billing solution, none of which should be surprising if you've been following along.

Architectural Overview

From a high-level perspective, we're going to launch Call Theory Billing as a stand-alone web-application. The application can be installed and ran on-premise, or professionally hosted by Call Theory. There is no functional difference or feature difference in the software regardless of where you choose to run it.

Similar to the Call Theory Mission Control Dashboard, we'll be using the Laravel PHP framework, providing a wide-variety of capable hosting environments and scalability options.

Copyleft Licensing

Next, we are going to release our billing project - poorly nicknamed Call Theory Billing - under the copyleft Functional Source License (FSL.)

This means the source code will be readily available for you to use - as long as you don't use that source code to compete with Call Theory. Notably, internal-use and consulting for permitted purposes are allowed. You just can't use the code to host a competing product or service.

This applies for up to 2 years following any software release, at which time it converts to a permissive MIT license. The MIT license allows full commercial use with very few restrictions.

Building In The (Spirit Of) Open

The copyleft licensing allows us to publish the source code publicly, and for your company to download and use it internally.

As a result, it's very close to the spirit of open-source that I grew up with, while providing Call Theory protections if someone wants to resell part or all of the project as their own.

This means we can (and will) share in-depth explanations over the next several months on how we approach building our billing solution.

Defining Formulas

Part of my intention behind this is to create, publish, and share the formula(s) that makes up each statistic. The formulas should be based on community consensus with the ability to modify or bring your own formulas for different stats.

Ideally we can create a community library of billable statistics and their definitions, including full SQL formulas for pulling the data.

I have explicitly balked at (read: avoided) creating call statistic software in the past: mostly because Amtelco hasn't been cooperative in defining formulas and the reporting available needs some work on consistency.

However, these formulas make up the baseline building block for just about everything else that we would want to be customer facing, including stats and reporting for customers.

Beyond Billing

Developing the billing engine sets the stage for future products, like the 2nd-most requested feature, a customer statistics portal.

What good are statistics on the portal, if the billing doesn't match?

So, if you want to learn way too much about how billing works, follow along the next few months. We'll be breaking down the Amtelco Crystal Reports used for billing and explaining how those formulas can be refined and used with multipliers, limits, and more.