Rate Upload

The rates table may be prepared using a spreadsheet processor (e.g. MS Excel) and can then be easily imported into PortaBilling®.

This is very convenient if your termination partner sends you a file with rate updates that must be entered into PortaBilling® in order to calculate costs and route your customers’ calls properly. This can be done with the help of the Rate Upload functionality. To upload your rates file, perform the following steps:

On the Rate Upload for Tariff page, click Browse.
Locate your file with rates, then click Open.
On the Rate Upload for Tariff page, select all required options:
- Add rates from the file to existing rates - The default option is to add new rates. If there is at least one parameter that differentiates a new rate from the existent one then the new rate will override it. If a rate for a certain prefix exists in the tariff but is not present in the file you received from the carrier, it will remain unchanged.
- Replace all of the existing rates with the rates from the file – The Replace mode is often used when service providers need to upload new rates and ensure that there are no “old” rates remaining. This mode operates as follows:
- Rates with ‘effective from’ date from the past should be uploaded as effective immediately – Sometimes you might receive a file with rates later than expected, when the moment at which the rates were supposed to become effective has already passed. Select this check box to upload these rates as effective immediately or leave the check box unselected to skip these rates.
- Skip rates with the same data – Sometimes carriers will include all prefixes in a rate update file, even if no change in pricing has occurred for some of them. In order to prevent the creation of duplicated rate rows, simply select this check box.
- Template – Here you select an existent template or choose the Create New Template option to create a new template. For the latter case, the settings for this file format are stored in a template, so the next time you get a rate update from the carrier you simply upload this file into PortaBilling® using this template.
- Timezone – Here you choose a time zone for which the rates from the uploaded file will become effective.
On the Upload Rates page, click Next .
On the Review File Parsing page, verify whether the file was parsed correctly and, if necessary, change file parsing parameters such as delimiters.
On the Review Data Fields Definition page, specify where individual data fields (e.g. destination, price or payback rate) are located in the file.
On the Review Rate Information page, view information about rates, adjust the value of prices and mark the desired rates as payback, then click Next. If there are new destinations in the uploaded file, assign a country and destination group to these destinations on the Create New Destinations page.
On the Summary page, view information about the number of rate records to be processed. You can also save the rate import options you have defined as a template, so that you can re-use them in the future.
On the Rate Upload page, click Start Import.
On the Edit Tariff page, click Close.
You can verify your work on the Rates page. For more details regarding rate upload, see the PortaBilling Templates Guide.
Administrators can initiate virtually an unlimited number of tariff upload sessions simultaneously. The only limitations here are the hardware resources: the amount of free disk space and available random-access memory on the PortaBilling® Web server.

If you experience network connection issues, we recommend that you change the load balancing among the web servers to ensure seamless rate upload. To do this, set the consistent method for the Web cluster -> HAProxy group -> hash_type option on the Configuration server.