Alpiron Suite - Billing and Reporting Platform
The Alpiron Billing System is a centralized billing system that generates detailed savings reports complete with time, pricing and power consumption. The core of Alpiron Billing System is a single database (SQL Server) that contains all the management information for billing including price lists, customer data, Alpiron Suite database locations and more.
Comprised as a set of two programs (BConsole and reportCMD), one Alpiron Billing System installation can generate reports from any number of Alpiron Suite installations. Both programs produce their output in PDF format ready to be printed or mailed.
Configuration and Generation of Invoices
The BConsole program is used for configuring the billing system and manually creating periodic saving reports and invoices.
Alpiron Billing System requires data about actual usage and the time at which the nodes were on or off; when a node is running it ‘generates’ on-time; when the node is off it ‘generates’ off-time. This information can be found in all Alpiron Suite installations and is collected automatically by the Alpiron Controller. Savings Reports - the theoretical cost that a node would incur if it were running - are based on off-time.
BConsole additionally requires electricity pricing and node power ratings - both of which the administrator enters into a special billing database. For example: if a node with power rating of 200W was off for 10 hours and power prices are 0.12 $ per KWh, then the Invoiced Savings would be:
[$] = 10 * 200 *0.12 / 1000
ReportCMD is a command line program that can be scheduled to create periodic (daily, weekly, monthly etc) savings reports which can then be forwarded for automatic email distribution.
Topography
The figure above shows a typical combination of one Alpiron Suite Billing System with several Alpiron Suite installations. Server 1 contains the Billing Database while servers 2, 3, and 4 are typical Alpiron Suite installations.
Billing Reports are a combination of the data including pricing and customer information from the Alpiron Billing database running on Server 1, as well as the nodes on-and-off times on each of the other Alpiron Suite databases contained on servers 2, 3, and 4. The BConsole.exe and reportCMD.exe programs combine this data together into comprehensive reports and/or invoices.