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Ze
January 2016 v1.0
Zest4 Billing Specification
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Billing Information
Introduction
This document outlines how Zest4 provides billing data for our resellers and how, in turn, this data can
be used to bill a customer base. We at Zest4 offer a growing number of services and work with a
number of different suppliers providing you and your customers with the best and most competitive
service possible. As a Zest4 reseller you will be able to take advantage of our unique relationships with
different service providers while only needing to deal with one company to bill your customer base.
Call/Line Detail Files provided by Zest4 to our resellers will come to you after being processed through
our billing system and so will arrive ready to be uploaded into your billing system each month. This
document will explain the basics and will also help you in setting up your own billing system so that it is
ready to process Zest4 CDRs with ease.
Contact us:
For general billing queries please contact the Zest4 Partner Care team.
The team can be contacted by phone on 0161 956 3300 (Option 1) or via email:
For escalated billing queries or queries regarding CDRs/LDRs and the monthly Invoice Run please
contact [email protected] or the below team members.
Billing Manager: Benjamin Dehghan
Email: [email protected]
Head of Billing and Operations: Nicola Bryan
Email: [email protected]
Invoicing and Monthly CDR Delivery SLAs
Zest4 receive call files from the networks between the 3rd and 6th working day of each month.
Call files are processed by Zest4 upon receipt from the network and CDR’s are sent to re-sellers on
the 6th and 7th working day of the month. Zest4 provides a single CDR file containing call data from all
networks. Zest4 makes every endeavour to get call files out to our partners as soon as possible.
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PDF invoices will be available to view on the Zest4 Customer Portal on the 6th and 7th working day of
the month.
An LDR File, which we suggest is used for reconciliation purposes only, is provided and will be available
on the portal alongside the above.
Zest4’s CDR’s/LDR’s are made available on the Zest4 billing portal (for details on obtaining and
downloading your billing files please click here.) If you have any problems downloading the files or if
for any reason your file has not arrived please contact our Billing Manager.
Daily CDR Files
Daily CDR files are available every working day and will be available after 2:30pm on the Zest4 Billing
Portal. Daily CDR files are in the exact same format as the monthly CDR file we provide. For a full
CDR specification document please click here.
Due to limitations and delays in data being received and processed by the networks, the data received
on the unbilled CDRs provided by Zest4 will generally be 2 – 3 days behind. This delay is not created
by Zest4 and cannot be improved upon and so it is important to remember that the data in the call file
is not always up to the current date.
It is also important to remember that unbilled data received from networks may not always be 100%
accurate, often usage will come through late or not at all. Not all charges will appear on the unbilled
files, such charges include services such as O2 Travel, Euro/ROW/World traveller and
Worldwide24hrData.
*Unbilled CDRs should not be used to onward bill and should only be used to monitor customer
usage. A monthly CDR file will be provided each month including all calls and with all rating
completed, this file should be used to onward bill*
During our billing run there will be limited file availability. A file will be provided on the first working day
of the month. No subsequent files will be delivered after this point until the invoice run is complete. Once
the invoice run is complete normal service will resume.
If you have any questions or queries regarding the unbilled files please contact the billing team on 0161
956 3300 (Option 1 followed by option 5) or email [email protected]
Downloading the Unbilled CDR File
Log in at www.zest4customers.com and click on the Downloads tab.
You will then be able to see all the files available to download. To download simply click the blue CSV
button.
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Using the Zest4 Billing Portal and How to
Download Your Monthly Billing Files/View Invoices
The Zest4 Billing Portal can be accessed at:
www.zest4customers.com
All resellers will receive an email invite and must click on the link to set up their password before logging
on.
The initial email will be sent to the registered email address we hold on our system, subsequent reseller
or customer users can then be created by this user.
Invoice View
Once the user logs on, they will see the following options:
Customers will allow the user to view invoice details and set up new users. Click on the Blue Box
containing the account number to view the invoice details.
The boxes across the top denote the invoice – the date and the invoice number are quoted. The user
can click on the relevant invoice and the details of this invoice are populated in the box below:
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Scroll down to see the breakdown of services for this given invoice. This gives the handset number,
username and the charges on the invoice. Again if the user clicks on a different invoice then the
breakdown of services changes accordingly.
The user is able to download their invoice PDF, a csv file of all line rental items (LDR), and a csv of the
calls on the selected invoice (CDR). Note that for Resellers this is your monthly CDR in your usual
format to be uploaded into your billing system, and your LDR in CSV format. These are the files Zest4
would normally send to you by email. You can now simply log on and download them, and they will be
ready as soon as your monthly invoice is ready.
It is also possible to download a PDF or CSV of calls for a given service:
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The handset view can be changed to an overview of the charges if required:
Tariff Class Look Up
Tariff class look ups are available to download either by specific network or for all networks. This can
be run from the portal and will always be as up to date as our billing system. New call classes are
added monthly and so a tariff class look up should be downloaded each month prior to running your
own invoice run.
In order to download a tariff class look up – log in to the portal and click on the Reports tab as seen
below.
Select the tariff classes report and click the green ‘Run Report’ button. This will take you to a new page,
select the network and click download CSV report or view in window.
Zest4 CDR/LDR Specification Documents
Specification documents are available in the Billing area of the Marketing section of the Zest4 Partner
Portal. Please note that there may be slight differences in the data contained in each column between
the monthly and daily CDR files, due to this separate specification documents are provided for both
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unbilled and monthly CDR files. Once CDR file is provided with data from all networks (separate CDR
examples are simply to show the difference in data between networks).
A LDR Specification document is currently unavailable as we plan to make changes to this file format
in the near future. Once updated we will produce a LDR specification document.
How to Open and Edit a Zest4 Monthly CDR File
The monthly CDR file that we provide our resellers is ready to be loaded straight into your billing system.
It is not recommended to open and edit the file before doing this but we understand that in some
circumstances you will need to be able to do this even if just to look at the data we have sent you.
Please be careful not to change the data format or to save over the original copy of the CDR we send
as this could affect your invoice run. This guide will show you how to open the file step by step.
Step One: Locate the file you wish to open, select this file and drag a copy of it to your desktop.
Step Two: Open a new Excel workbook, drag and drop the file into the Excel window.
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Step Three: Select row A, go to the data tab at the top and click on Text to Columns.
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Step Four: Ensure Delimited is selected and click next.
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Step Five: You can leave Tab and Comma selected but then select other. In the text box press the
shift key and the | (pipe) key together. This Key has the symbols | and \ on and is located between the
shift and Z keys on your keyboard.
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Step Six: Select all the data in the Data Preview box by holding shift and selecting, change the column
data format to Text and then click complete.
SFTP Availability
Zest4 offer the ability to download our unbilled CDRs automatically using SFTP access. Please
contact the billing department for your log in details. Access details are:
IP: 212.44.24.89
Port: 22
Monthly files are currently unavailable using SFTP. We are working on making this available in the
near future.
Commissions
Airtime Payments – i.e Main monthly invoice and wholesale discount
After the billing run has completed, you will receive an invoice from Zest4 for the total billed
revenue on your account. This is usually on or around 10th of each month.
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Shortly after receiving the total billed invoice, you will receive a revenue share credit (for the
wholesale discount). This is usually on or around the 15th of each month. A “Rev Share
Statement” will accompany the revenue share credit showing the amount due to be received
by Zest4 by the 8th of the following month on your airtime account.
The reseller should review the total billed invoice, revenue share credit and any stock balance,
and raise queries by COP on the last working day of the month, in advance of the payment
date of the 8th of the following month.
Connection Payments – i.e Bonuses and Extra Funding
We will send you a separate “Connections Statement” on the 25th of the month which will detail
all connection, resign and additional bonus payments relating to connections from the previous
month.
It will also show any stock outstanding
It will show any charge credits, manual invoices etc
Bonuses will be paid into your bank account on the last working day of the month following
connection, to allow you a window to query these. e.g June connections have been paid on the
last working day of July. Any balance payable to Zest4 should also be paid by the last working
day by yourselves.
We will send a Self-Bill Invoice by the third working day of the following month to match the
statement, reflecting the connection payments
Commission queries should be raised via the commission query form found here:
http://www.zest4partners.com/site/marketing/general/tools/
And sent to [email protected]
We aim to resolve all commission queries within 5 working days. Any additional payments due will be
paid on the next commission run in the cycle.
Contact the commission team:
Phone: 0161 956 3300 (Option 1, Option 4)
Email: [email protected]