[asterisk-biz] Rates Importer Tool

[A E [Gmail]]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Matt Riddell <lists at venturevoip.com> wrote:

> On 10/05/11 6:28 AM, A E [Gmail] wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> new to the list. Wondering if anyone has / knows of, a good rate
>> importer tool that can be used to standardize and normalize the
>> ratesheets / rate decks etc. obtained from various carriers so they can
>> be analysed and imported into a DB or be saved as a CSV or something?
>>
>
> We've done it, but just for our ITSP platform.
>
> Even then, it still can require tweaking.
>
> We provide an Excel import field.
>
> The system imports the Excel file and shows the fields on screen for the
> first few rows.
>
> It then asks you what field contains: Dest Name, Dest Number and Rate.
>
> Once it's done that it asks you for any tweaking of the numbers required
> from E164 formatting (i.e. some providers expect you to dial 00XX where XX
> is the international code, others require 011XX etc etc.
>
> It then asks you for an across the board markup on their rate and what the
> currency is.
>
> There is an option to update exchange rates.
>
> It's a pretty complicated system but works.
>
> We maintain buy and sell rates and there is an option to convert between
> them when you import new buy rates - although the buy rate might change
> because of route issues, the sell rate always stays the same.  The sell rate
> is different for different rate plans.
>
> I'm not sure how useful our code would be for anyone else as it is just
> formatting the data for use by our LCR + Weighting AGI scripts, but I'd be
> happy to provide anyone else with assistance if they're looking at writing
> one.
>
> --
> Cheers,
>
> Matt Riddell
>

Hello Matt,

Thanks for that. How do you handle the rate updates from your suppliers?
I've noticed that the harder part is not so much importing the initial
complete A-Z that the upstream provider gives (as hard as that is), but the
weird ways that suppliers give out the rate updates esp. when they throw in
the various prefixes/breakout of a destination in a single cell separated by
dashes or commas or whatever and some give out rate updates one per line or
some other weird format like prefix ranges.

It doesn't really matter of what format your code spits out the normalized
rates, it'll be very useful for us if we could just get the code for
importing and mapping the various fields to some normalized format. We don't
expect to be spoon-fed but whatever help your code can provide us will
shorten our development time, if you're happy sharing the code as is minus
anything proprietary or business sensitive in there.

Thanks
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-biz/attachments/20110509/72762c46/attachment-0001.htm>