Feature Request - Customer Account Code / shortname

[listerr]

Hello,

We are about to change our accounts system to something other than Sage, which has a decent API to allow us to do more integration with the billing and invoicing side of things.

We are exploring ways that we could integrate more closely with IXP Manager, even if this is relatively simple to begin with, for example making a note in each customer account when invoices have been raised/paid etc and possibly looking at automating the change of billing details <-> IXP manager and the accounts system, although this might need "semi-automating" or a script to identify where there are discrepancies in the billing and IXP manager database, since the accounts system is for the time being the canonical source of this information.

Sage accounts has a customer "account name" field which is mostly the same as "shortname", and cannot be changed once the account has been set up.

I note the IXP Manager documentation however, has this to say about shortname:

The Shortname field is something we are slowly removing. It is currently visible in some URLs and a couple other areas. It should be a lowercase single word ([a-z0-9]) and it should not be changed after it is set.

So, possibly this is a bad field to use for integrating it with our accounts system, if it's going away.

What to do?

I'd like to suggest the following:

1. In the accounts/billing part of IXP Manager, add an "account code" field to allow IXP Manager and accounts system to be tied together. This might need to be non-unique per customer, because it's possible that multiple IXP Manager custs be paid for on the same account/invoice, though when setting up our new accounting system, we can look at ways this mapping of IXP Manager <-> Accounting system is achieved. Customers probably like having everything on one invoice rather than multiple invoices and accounts because they are paying for multiple memberships.

2. One advantage of the "shortname" field is that, some of our members seem to change names about once a year, and when looking at cable labels or struggling to remember what they have called themselves this week, the "shortname" field is a handy way to find this, since it doesn't change.

• Can we add a "Also Known As" field to make this useful again?

I think we also use "shortname" in other places such as defining device names in monitoring, where you need a "unique, humanly readable name to give this monitored device" or to link in with some other system.

None of this is particularly sexy or exciting I know, but would be extremely useful to us in our upcoming plan to change our accounting system and to make life a lot easier on this front.

Rob

[kieber]

Rob,

may I point you to InvoiceNinja for which we have a script to synchronize IXP Managers billing data to it.

Ulf

[listerr]

Thanks Ulf,

We use xero to do invoicing and so far works pretty well for us.

We also have a script to compare ports in IXP Manager with what we are billing in xero and to highlight any mismatches (e.g. we're still billing for a port that's been cancelled in IXP Manager, or a port has been upgraded and we're not billing the correct amount in Xero) We also try to identify members added to IXP Manager that have not been added to Xero.

Manual intervention is required because there's no field in IXP Manager to identify which account in xero relates to which member in IXP Manager with certainty. We maintain an external table to match these together (which has to be manually updated), but it would be easier if there was just a field in IXP Manager to tie them together. (e.g., put the account ref from Xero (or your accounting system) into IXP Manager.) then this manual step goes away.