Hi Thorne, Thorne Lawler schrieb:

Folks,

We're implementing OTRS here as a replacement for Kemma software's "Bridge Tracker" since their mercenary approach to maintenance and support has bled us dry.

I have now fought my way through installing OTRS on an iPlanet web server, with an Oracle backend, only to find that we're missing a key piece of functionality:

We need to be able to associate a billing rate with a ticket, so that hours worked against that ticket will be billed at the appropriate rate. Ideally, the user would select the billing rate from a drop-down list of possible rates, each with its own rate-code. Once a rate was selected, a ticket would show you the charges for that ticket, based on hours worked multiplied by that rate.

I basically understand your request, but would you please be more detailed and give examples helping me understanding your request without suggestiveness.

Is there any way to do this within OTRS?

Thanks in advance.

Bye, Alex

I have impemented something rather crude to handle charges and invoicing within OTRS (using Open Offices to generate the invoices) in the past. Basically I used the free fields to enter the charge values and created a query that generated a table containing the invoicing and charge data. To get it to work effectively did need to tweak the ticket states to represents an invoicing process i.e. charge raised, invoice pending printing, invoice printed, payment received etc... bit of a kludge.. but suited my purposes.. The questions in your case are really a) What is your charge structure and how complex is it? b) Is invoicing and accounting required and if so how is it handled? If there are defined rates for classes of activities would suggest that although queues for rates sounds good, the use of ticket states to indicate charge rates (e.g. Open ticket - Rate 1 etc) would be more flexible. Agents can indicate the time worked on on a ticket, and a query can be created to generate charge totals by applying rate according to ticket status and updating a free field accordingly. Alternatively, Ticket states could also be used to distinguish between an Open Ticket that is being worked on (e.g. Work ticket - Rate 1) and one that is open but inactive, and charges calculated using the information on how long the ticket was held in this state. (Could do some sophisticated things with such a mechanism). Unfortunately, a ticket state change effectively only generates a ticket state change record. Actions that would need to be performed with non standard ticket would have to performed with a background cron job, and checking a large number of ticket states frequently enough to potentially give a good response may be problematic. Note to developers: It might be useful to associate ticket state changes with ticket state change events (by having a field in the ticket state definition that associates a ticket state with an operation to be performed when a ticket state changes). This probably does imply implementing some sort of event handling queue (and queue handler), but could be an answer some questions that have been asked in the on this list in the past. Thorne Lawler said:

Folks,

We're implementing OTRS here as a replacement for Kemma software's "Bridge Tracker" since their mercenary approach to maintenance and support has bled us dry.

I have now fought my way through installing OTRS on an iPlanet web server, with an Oracle backend, only to find that we're missing a key piece of functionality:

We need to be able to associate a billing rate with a ticket, so that hours worked against that ticket will be billed at the appropriate rate. Ideally, the user would select the billing rate from a drop-down list of possible rates, each with its own rate-code. Once a rate was selected, a ticket would show you the charges for that ticket, based on hours worked multiplied by that rate.

Is there any way to do this within OTRS?

Thanks in advance.

-- _________________________________ Thorne Lawler Systems Administrator

t: +61 3 8329 2026 f: +61 3 9326 7588 e: thorne.lawler@microlistics.com.au

Microlistics A Dawson Group Company www.microlistics.com.au _________________________________

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