I'm evaluating CitrusDB for a telecoms-like application, having abandoned an evaluation of jBilling.
CitrusDB seems more limited, but at least I got it working quickly with a simple initial demo setup of my own - which is more than I can say for jBilling, after spending around a week on it. These are the points I'd like to share. Thanks to anyone who can confirm or correct or make suggestions. Limitation to a single currency: as I'm not evaluating on my own behalf, I'm not sure yet if this is a showstopper. There doesn't seem to be an obvious workaround, though I noticed that no currency unit appeared on the sample invoice I generated. Perhaps the simplest way would be to run a separate installation of CitrusDB for each currency (which might be acceptable if they could be limited to, say, three, but which is obviously not an appealing solution)? Volume discounts, discount for advance payment, etc. I didn't see a section dealing with this subject in the manual. My understanding is that this would have to be implemented by whatever code is importing the usage data into the Citrus database. So if the user has paid for 100 units in advance for the month, getting a fixed discounted price, then a separate PHP script that finds the usage is 90 does nothing, but if it finds the usage is 110 then it adds another service with a quantity of 10 to be billed at the usual rate. Correct? (The equivalent logic in jBilling would be in Drools rules.) Only one piece of ancillary data in the invoice: if an options table is defined to store extra information associated with a service then only the first column from this appears in the invoice. Workaround: store all the data that should be printed in the first column, duplicating parts of it in other columns if it is necessary or convenient to access them as separate numbers or codes, etc. (Ideally, I think one of those numbers might be a rate so that the same service could be billed at different rates, rather than creating a different service for each rate. The rate might be the outcome of some complex function of durations, ratios or the like, so that the number of services needed could otherwise be large due to the many different possible outcomes of the rate calculation. However, that's probably expecting too much.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Citrusdb-users mailing list Citrusdb-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/citrusdb-users
