[asterisk-users] Rates Importer Tool

[Markus]

Hi,

> 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?

I'm using a2billing (http://www.a2billing.org), a free of charge and
complete call shop web-based PHP application for Asterisk. Very buggy
overall but I couldn't find anything better (which is free of charge) yet.
Anyway, it gets the job done. I'm uploading the rate sheets to a Linux box
respectively download them directly to the box and then use a shell script
for each provider's rate sheet to properly order to fit into the a2billing
format, a la:

wget http://www.provider.com/rates/premium.csv
cat premium.csv | grep \"1\",\"1\" > temp.csv
cat temp.csv | cut -d "," -f 3 > tempcode.csv
cat temp.csv | cut -d "," -f 1 > tempdest.csv
cat temp.csv | cut -d "," -f 6 > temprate.csv
paste -d "," tempcode.csv tempdest.csv temprate.csv temprate.csv | tail
-n+2 | sed 's/^\"/\"00/g' > Provider.PREMIUM.$DATE.csv
unix2dos Provider.PREMIUM.$DATE.csv
scp -P 450 Provider.PREMIUM.$DATE.csv user at athome.dyndns.org:samba/_rates/
rm temp.csv tempcode.csv tempdest.csv temprate.csv premium.csv

This fetches and orders the rate sheet properly and uploads it to my home.
Then I just log into a2billing and upload the rate sheet there, done with
a few clicks. But you could also create a new ratecard directly in MySQL
and store the rates there directly if you want to. a2b stores all rates in
a MySQL DB. You can then choose least cost routing between different
providers etc.

Also, when a provider only supplies XLS instead of CSV, I use a script
like the following, utilizing "xlhtml":

xlhtml -csv -xp:0 Provider.xls | cut -d "," -f 1-3 > temp.csv
cat temp.csv | cut -d "," -f 3 > temp2.csv
paste -d "," temp.csv temp2.csv | tail -n+3 | sed 's/^/00/g' >
Provider.PREMIUM.$DATE.csv
unix2dos Provider.PREMIUM.$DATE.csv
scp -P 450 Provider.PREMIUM.$DATE.csv user at athome.dyndns.org:samba/_rates/
rm temp.csv
rm temp2.csv

Regards.