A per device breakdown of the total Ting bill. The cost of minutes, data, and messages would be assigned to each device proportionately to it's use and the $6 charge added. Rounding should ensure that the total of all individual values equals the actual bill total.
For extra credit, allow devices to be grouped and summed.
ex:
Bill Total - $3.00
MyPhone - $1.00
Parents - $2.00
(Mom - $1.00)
(Dad - $1.00)
Comments
Let's limit this to 2 phones for simplicity's sake. Both your phone and your mom's phone cost $6 per month to keep alive.
If you use 65 minutes, and your mom uses 65 minutes...that's 130 minutes. Who gets charged for the 0-100 (+$3) minutes, and who gets charged for the 101-500 minutes (+$6)?
Are you responsible for $9, and you mom's responsible for $12, or is that switched? Is it $10.50 each?
Each would be charged according to the ratio of their use. $6 (Device Charge) + $4.50 (half the cost of 130 minutes), so $10.50 each.
Also, just in case I was ambiguous, In actuality only one person gets charged. The cost breakdown is only informational.
This is how I would do it:
$6 each to start wih
then brake down by each category
Minutes
(cost/totalMinutesUsed) x individualminutes
Messages
(cost/totalTextsUsed) x individualTexts
Data
(cost/totalDataUsed) x individualData
Than just sum it all up depending on needs.
Interesting idea.
I've added this as "Planned" but since we just did an update to most sections of the Dashboard this probably won't happen for a while.
+1
I created an Excel spreadsheet to do all that for my family, but was disappointed at the end of my first billing cycle find that only the current month's totals are available under Your Account -> Devices tab. It would be nice to have a those totals per device available for each bill (preferably in the same layout so I can just copy and paste the grid into my spreadsheet). As it stands, I need to remember to copy the grid at the end of the last day of the billing cycle.
I wrote a python script that does this. It's a little rough around the edges for now, and too much of the stuff is hard-coded in, but it parses the CSV files to add up all the minutes, data, and number of texts each phone number has used. If I clean it up for general use, I'll post a link here.
I was going to post almost exactly what David did. With 7 lines, people are all over the place on minutes, texts and MBs, so I made a spreadsheet where I just have to input the #s for a fair usage/cost breakdown.
The running total under Your Account > Devices is very handy and should be implemented on the final bill. Even Sprint, which does unlimited text and data breaks down everything, so it would make more sense to do so for a company with tiered pricing.
Since my last post, here is my work around until Ting updates the Devices page as suggested: I download each CSV file for the billing cycle, select all records, and sort by Device/Phone. Then (one of the few improvements that I found in Office 2010), subtotal at each change in Device/Phone using the function Sum or Count as appropriate on the duration, usage, or device column. On the data spreadsheet, I add a column to calculate the MB used by dividing total KB by 1024 and rounding up or down. The totals then go onto my spreadsheet that calculates each user's portions based on usage. I found that it is simplest to not over-estimate your monthly usage plans so that you don't end up with credits to have to calculate when splitting the bill.
There are a few caveats such as my spreadsheet does not allow for a grace amount/percentage if you only barely go over your plan. I have the rates listed in a tab and reference them like a lookup table. As I mentioned before, it does not calculate credit amounts well either. This solution is not very elegant, but it is accurate enough for my purposes. I've attached a generic version of my spreadsheet in case it will help others. The only fields needed to update with your own data are those highlighted in orange. The green fields are all calculated.
Enhanced billing/reporting would reduce barriers to businesses adopting Ting. Everywhere I have worked that also provided smartphones to employees, billing was by department with detailed bills delivered to the departmental budget manager. Therefore, the ability to specify not only a nickname but also a second field for identifying the phone. So a Ting customer could put the department name/billing code in the first field and then the employee name in the second. Or the manager's name in the first field and their employee's name in the second.
The second piece of this would be to offer a billing option that would sort and do a page break by either field would be very helpful. A cost breakout per device would be very useful--both a detailed one that would make sense to an individual, and a summary report with one line per phone.
Having both printable documents and CSV files with the raw data is great. I hope both will continue to be offered.
I'm not sure what your platform is, but I've developed any number of similar reports for companies I've worked for. I'd be glad to be either a beta-tester or possibly even a developer.
So I needed this as well recently, and while the csv files are great, I decided to build a little something to do so. I created a page that allows one to upload their csv's for the month, add the fees and taxes, and it will split out the bill for each device listed in the bill. Nothing gets saved on any site, and nothing gets submitted to any server, all the calculation is done via jQuery on the browser.
http://www.skheath.com/split-ting
Wow Sabrina. I'm impressed. I absolutely love the ingenuity and creativity of our customers. A lot of what you see on Ting has come from the great minds of our extended Ting family, such as yourself.
Thanks! I double checked to make sure that the tiers are set up correctly as well as handling the 5% pricing grace, and I'm pretty sure I got that part right (though if Ting wants to double check, I'd love some validation :) ).
I've been wanting this for a longggg time. Yours worked great for the first few months, but I could only use it up until January 2013. After that we've been above XXL, and it throws a NaN error. Any chance you'll be fixing that soon? :)
Ting, if you're listening -- This is something that would be so easy for you to implement, and without the hassle of having to download and save three .csv files for each month. Please consider!
Yep, I'm working on that feature next! Since that's outside of their tier pricing, I've got to add in some more calculations to handle that part of the billing.
I've also been waiting for Ting to do this as well, but as a web developer I know how much they've probably got on their hands to deal with. At least I'm glad that this feature is planned! Until then I hope this may help out others like myself for splitting the bill.
I've just made the latest changes to handle pricing outside of tiers. I don't have any outside-tier bills to test with so hopefully everything should be all good. If anything does look off, I've added a contact email for requests.
http://skheath.com/split-ting/
Sabrina,
This. Is. Awesome.
Wish this was built into the Ting dashboard (shouldn't be that difficult since the current month's is split out, right?) In the meantime, though I'll use this. Thanks so much!
Glad this is helping out people! I'm still doing some small updates to the split-ting app to improve it a bit in terms of usability. Also, there's still a slight rounding bug that may end up giving you a final tally that might be up to three cents off, I'm trying to get this fixed at the moment. If there's anything else requested for the app, you can email the address on the page with your requests!
http://skheath.com/split-ting/
Hi Sabrina.
Thanks for the great app. Are you planning to update it for the new fee structure? That would be great.
Yep, that is in the works! Been dealing with a new job, so haven't had as much time to make some needed changes to the app.
Just would love to throw in my opinion that having this functionality built in to the bill or website would be wonderful! That said, Sabrina, you're website is a huge help for now, so thank you!
Not sure if we can "vote" up a planned feature, but if we can I'd love to see Sabrina's feature integrated directly into the Ting system. I just finished my second billing cycle with Ting and have my parents on my plan with me. I've been paying until now and we've been debating between splitting the bill 3 ways or by what we use. This makes the latter much easier and payment more fair.
Hello,
I realize this is an already planned feature, but hopefully it either is NOT to late to accept additional suggestions / requirements OR to start thinking about future expansion to increase the flexibility of the feature.
My thought on an offline / downloadable billing statement is:
BTW, this idea isn't completely new as several banks generate Excel spreadsheets for their customers and allow them to go back into their account history, too.
Thank you so very much for being open to suggestions by customers.
Bertram,
Ting has already made it so you can import the data into Excel. Choose "Your Account -> Bills" and pick an entry that says Monthly Usage. You should see entries all the way back to your first bill.
You have links to csv files for minutes, messages, and megabytes. The csv files also work with programs that compete with Excel too.
Ting is in the business of providing cell phone service in a manner that is as transparent as is reasonably possible.
The past few months I've used the Split-Ting utility at http://www.skheath.com/split-ting.
It worked great and saved me time and headaches ... but as of today (14 Jun 14), that link is dead (error 502 Bad Gateway). Is it really gone for good or is this just a glitch? I think this utility should be incorporate into the Ting website permanently. Why not?
Is this ever going to happen in the Ting control panel? This is a pretty big deal for a lot of people, and would be so easy for you guys to implement. Please let us know an official status of this request.
Thanks!!
Hey Brett. That's something we're still working on but have no word on when it will be implemented yet. We're definitely aware of this request and should have the chance to do it when we have a dashboard update.
Well new dashboard update and still not a feature. :-(
Well, for the most part, skheath.com/split-ting is still up and available (server will go down occasionally which is why you may get a 502 Bad Gateway once in a while). I just noticed that the calculations were using the wrong column for minutes, which is why names were popping up. That's been fixed.
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