Charging Customers for their International Calls

[VOIPoTim]

You can set an international minute limit for each account. This is separate from their normal monthly limit.

Here's what I recommend:

1) Set a limit for everyone (even on unlimited plans) to prevent fraud/abuse. If someone legitimately hits the limit, you can always up it when that happens.

If there is no limit and someone has a ton of usage that is not legitimate or turns out to be fraud, there's no way to go back.

Limits protect you.

2) Bill your clients for the base plan charge. Depending on how you structure your service, this is likely a monthly fee or maybe yearly depending on the plans you offer.

So as an example with a toll-free number, you might charge $5 per month for the number. I recommend setting this up as a recurring product if you use billing system so it's automatically charged.

3) Pick a day of the month and bill international on that day. Just generate the usage report and then invoice the customer in your billing system for the total due for that period.

Something like this: "March International Calls: $8.43". If you're not billing it based on the calendar month, then just put the date range on it.

Keep in mind that international and usage charges don't necessarily need to be based on the billing cycle. I recommend making it based on the calendar month (so you calculate everything based on 1st-31st of each month. That way it's consistent and you're not driving yourself crazy with customers on different billing cycles trying to match up their usage to their renewal dates.

I wouldn't worry about putting the details of the calls on there. One line item should be fine because they can always refer to their call logs for the actual calls during that period.


Yes, this means some customers get billed more than once a month. That's just the reality of VoIP though and almost all providers do that. Even with VoIPo, usage is billed at different cycles than the actual plans.

For example, we sell a toll-free number with 100 minutes included each month for $4.95. Say someone signs up on the 16th. There's a recurring item for $4.95 for them that bills them each month on their anniversary (16th). We calculate all usage though based on the calendar month (1-31) and invoice them separately for that. We also will bill customers for any unbilled usage charges anytime they exceed $10 even if that's 5 times per month so people do not build up large balances.

The key is to keep it simple and not overanalyze it. It takes a little work to manually do it, but as long as you keep it simple, it can be done.