[Asterisk-biz] Opportunities for good billing solutions

[snacktime]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:33:05 -0700, Kevin P. Fleming
<kpfleming at starnetworks.us> wrote:
> snacktime wrote:
> 
> > 1. credit card/ach processing engine
> > 2. recurring billing engine
> > 3. administrative interface for customer management/reporting
> > 4. customer interface for viewing bills,cancelling services, etc..
> > 5. interfaces to * to collect whatever data is needed for all of the above
> 
> 6. Taxation
> 7. Municipality determination and reporting
> 8. Reciprocal Compensation
> 9. Support for resellers
> 
> This is a _huge_ job; I welcome the effort, but after just spending a
> day at VON looking at the existing (non-open-source) solutions, I don't
> think an open source team will have a product that an actual business
> could use for quite some time...
> 
Yes it's a huge job, and if you try to do it all at once it would be a
while before you had a usable product.  That said, I think you could
divide it up into 2-3 pieces that can be used either by themselves, or
as additional pieces to the puzzle as you move along in the
development.

For example, most of the billing solutions out there just tie into a
third party credit card processor.  Replacing the third party
processor with an open source processing engine would be of value in
and of itself.

Another big plus would be 2-3 people each doing a certain area that
have already done it before.  For example the credit card processing
engine took me about 2 weeks to write and debug doing it part time.   
The first time I wrote a similar application it took me 3 months to
get it right and about 6 before all the bugs were out.  I could
probably finish up the recurring billing in about a week, and 2-3
weeks for a basic web interface.  At this point for me it's really
just busy work.

Now if I had to write the code to integrate with *, that would take me
considerably longer.

> Also keep in mind that a product like this nearly demands being built on
> top of an existing web-style framework (Zope/Plone, Horde, etc),
> otherwise the team will have to build all that stuff from scratch, and
> the end user will have limited customization ability.

True, I wouldn't even think about writing something from scratch.  The
two platforms I have under consideration right now are Zope and the
Template Toolkit which is mod perl based.    I'm leaning towards Zope
at the moment.

Chris