Service Plans


Service Plan is the feature that allows billing Account periodically for fixed amount of minutes to certain destinations ("Minute Plans") and/or additional services provided, such as Voicemail, System Access Fee and so on ("Service Charges").

Service Plan consists of three major parts:

  • Tariff, which sets prices for calls to destinations outside of the minute plan;
  • Service charges, which sets fixed prices per billing period for various additional services provided;
  • Minute plans, which defines fixed "bundles" of minutes to certain destinations and their prices per billing period.

Each service plan also has several parameters defining the billing period (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly), type of the plan Pre-Paid or Post-Paid and action that the system should take if the billing run for a particular Account has failed (for example due to insufficient balance). Available actions include: block account or use Tariff to charge all further outgoing calls.

The difference between pre-paid and post-paid plans is that as the name suggests, charges for the pre-paid plan will be applied at the beginning of the billing period, while charges for the post-paid - at the end of the billing period. Therefore, for the post-paid billing plan it is possible for an account's balance to go lower than the credit limit would otherwise allowed in the case if the account does not have funds sufficient to cover Service Charges and/or cost of Minute Plans at the end of a billing period.

Once the Service Plan has been assigned to at least one account, the system would disallow any changes to pricing and or composition of the Service Charges or Minute Plans. Only Service Plan name and list of Destination Patterns could be updated. The correct approach to update existing plans is to create a new plan with different parameters and migrate existing users to the new plan. Once all users have been migrated the system would unblock the old plan allowing it to be modified of deleted if necessary.

See Also

Syntax of the Destination Patterns in the Service Plans


Sippy Softswitch 1.8