Introduction

The purpose of this document is to report the analysis of Freeside Billing solution. Freeside is an open-source billing, CRM, trouble ticketing and provisioning automation software for wired and wireless ISPs, VoIP, hosting, service and content providers and other online businesses. Freeside Internet Services Inc. provides customization and support of the Freeside open-source billing platform.

I tried to install the last Freeside version in Debian 9. Installing the solution using the provided installation manual has been impossible to me. However, I can base my analysis on the provided demo page.

Documentation

Installation

Freeside provides an installation manual, but I face the problem below:

Accepting the second solution, the Perl packages are installed and consequently Freeside. But in the following next steps, I find more errors. After many tries, I decided to use the demo page.

Demo analysis

The Key features of the solution are listed below:

Billing

· Flexible pricing and rating plans including anniversary billing, pro-rating, usage-based billing and more. Plug-in system allows easy addition of new pricing plans.

· VoIP rating and billing, including DID inventory, rate plans, free minutes, caps, and 800# billing.

· Real-time credit card and electronic check processing with all major processing gateways. Email, fax, printed and online invoicing.

Ticketing

· Complete, integrated trouble ticketing system included, based on Request Tracker from Best Practical Solutions

· Auto-responds to customer email assigns a ticket number and allows your staff to track requests collaboratively

· Multiple queues, custom fields, templates, ticket associations, templates, customizable workflow, and more.

Customer Service

· Online signup page with immediate credit card authorization and provisioning.

· Customer self-care including invoice viewing, one-time and recurring payments, adding and removing services, and password changes.

· Simple API available to write your own self-service pages or applications.

Resellers

· Unlimited resellers with branded invoices, individual pricing and payment gateways.

· Virtualized reseller access allows resellers access to only their own customers.

· Flexible, fine-grained access control

The Freeside interface is old and, at first glance, unfriendly. The problem is that Freeside was created for different purposes before the inclusion of VoIP, so there are many features that we do not need. In my opinion, the creation of rates, prefixes and plans is more complicated than other solutions such as Magnus Billing, Porta Billing or A2Billing.

In our case, we do not need the option of resellers, so a key feature of this solution is useless for us. On the other hand, the ticket system is a good feature for customer service management.

Regarding VoIP functions, it is less complete than PortaBilling but includes CDR reports, rate plans, etc. Does not include limitation of simultaneous calls.

I could not find if Freeside applies the LCR algorithm when making the calling trunk.

The most powerful feature of Freeside is the generation of invoices. Use HTML templates that can be completely modified. It also allows you to configure when to send invoices based on a small script.

Conclusion

In my opinion, we cannot consider Freeside as a possible solution to our new billing system. It is difficult to install, there is little documentation and it has an old and complicated interface. It can do the work as I could read in some forum, but compared to other solutions, it's not enough professional neither simple.

Bibliography

http://www.freeside.biz/mediawiki/index.php/Freeside:4:Documentation:InstallingOnDebian9

http://www.freeside.biz/mediawiki/index.php/Freeside:3:Documentation:Administration

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