Low Balance Notifications
The Low Balance Notification feature will send an automatic notification email to a Customer or Account when their respective Available Credit goes below a certain threshold. Available Credit is calculated as sum of Balance and Credit Limit.
Notification emails are sent by the billing system in Sippy. The balance notification check runs once every 15 minutes. To ensure that the Account or Customer does not receive multiple (possibly unwanted) emails, only one notification email is sent when the Available Credit passes the threshold. When the Available Credit is updated an internal flag is reset, allowing a new notification email to be sent the next time the Available Credit passes the threshold.
Balance Notifications, and the balance threshold can be configured through the Additional Options on the listing page.
From the Actions Menu drop-down menu select "Auto-Recharge / Notifications" option.
Set the desired balance threshold here or select 'Disabled' from the drop-down menu. Selecting "Disabled" will result in ensuring that neither notifications nor card charges on low balance for the Account/Customer are sent.
Payment Processors that support automatic charges from stored card:
If there are matching Payment Processors configured, it's possible to setup an automatic recharge using preliminarily added Debit/Credit card once the Threshold is reached. In order to make this configured, in Balance Threshold section set Charge Card, define Charge Amount and select the card to be used.
It's also possible to charge the configured Debit/Credit card to top-up the balance of Account on every Billing Run, depending on Billing Cycle and Billing Date of Account's Service Plan it could be Weekly, Bi-Weekly or Monthly. To make this configured in Billing Run section set Charge Card, define Charge Amount and select the card to be used.
The same option is available from the Customers UI:
"Auto-Recharge / Notifications" settings for a customer.
Changes to Low Balance Notifications for Sippy Softswitch 2020
- Starting from Sippy 2020 you will be able to set a decimal precision value in the low balance notification email template. The ${balance} and ${real_balance} macros can be modified by including a ":" to denote the decimal precision. For example ${balance:4} will display 4 decimal places in the template, case precision is not specified, 2 decimal places would be present in corresponding digit after the dot.
- A new macro can be displayed for low balance Notifications that reflect the minimum payment. The value is retrieved from the Account or Customer properties; use ${min_payment_amount} on the email template to display this information.
- Low Balance Notifications can be sent as html. Previously, Notifications were restricted to plain text. The new feature will allow you to add Links for Payment to the email going out to your customers.