IMPROVED CALENDAR FUNCTIONALITY

We have improved the calendar by adding notifications and auditing visibility to calendar entries. This video will explain it to you in further detail:

WHAT IS NET PROMOTER SCORE (NPS)?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a benchmark test used by companies to measure a client’s overall satisfaction with your brand, and their willingness to recommend your services or products to others. It consists of a single question with a rating scale of 0 -10 (0 being completely dissatisfied, 10 being extremely satisfied).

Customers are classified into 3 categories based on the rating that they have given:

NPS IN HEROTILL

Previously, a rating system of 5 stars (1 = dissatisfied, 5 = extremely satisfied) was used by clients to rate our service. While this rating is a good measurement of client satisfaction, it is not an ideal way of scientifically measuring the output. This rating system has been changed to incorporate the NPS rating structure.

To enable customer ratings in HeroTill, go to the Sales Setup Menu (Sales->Sales Settings->Sales setup). You’ll see the following screen:

• Set “Allow customers to rate our service in their portal” to YES
• Set “Auto Create Ticket on Rating” and set it to YES
• Set a ratings threshold
• Click on Update when you are done.

This is what it now looks like on the customer’s side:

All submitted ratings are viewable under the Sales Leads, Ratings Menu (Sales->Sales Leads->Ratings).

On this screen all new ratings wait in a queue to be acknowledged. From there a ticket can be generated for further attention, if one was not already auto created by the threshold score.

And that’s it! Your guide to NPS in HeroTill. If you have any queries, questions or feedback, please send us a mail at support@herotill.com.

New feature: 1Voucher as a payment gateway

1voucher has been added as a third-party payment gateway. It allows customers to use 1voucher vouchers as a payment method in HeroTill in the following places:

Customer Portal:

• Customers have the ability to pay invoices with 1voucher vouchers
• Customers can buy vouchers on HeroTill using 1voucher

Hotspots

• Customers have the ability to buy 1voucher vouchers in hotspot

How does it work?

1voucher allows a customer to buy a voucher of a certain amount (cash value) which can be redeemed at certain vendors to pay for something.

Once a customer has bought a voucher (for a set amount), a 16-digit PIN is issued to the customer. This PIN is used as a payment method, until its initial value is exhausted. If a customer buys something for less than the initial amount issued on the voucher, they receive a change voucher, which can be used until the value is 0.

Scenario:

Jane buys a R500 voucher from 1Voucher. She buys R300 worth of data from a hotspot. She enters her 16-digit pin and receives her data.

She now had R200 left and is issued a change voucher from 1Voucher for R200 (with a new PIN).

She waits until her data is finished and spends the last R200 at the hotspot to buy more data using her new PIN.

Linking the 1voucher payment gateway(s) to your HeroTill

To link 1voucher as a payment gateway on HeroTill, go to Setup–>System Settings–>Payment gateways .

Select 1Voucher as a gateway, and enter your trader information:

The 1voucher payment gateway screen

Click on Update and your customers will be able to pay their accounts with their 1voucher credits.

Important to remember:

A 1voucher PIN is only displayed once. This means that you cannot go back to view your PIN The same goes for change vouchers. We urge you to write down this number or take a screenshot of it. Change voucher number retention is not a HeroTill responsibility but the responsibility of the end user.

As 1voucher is a 3^rd party vendor we cannot be held responsible for loss of voucher pins.

If you have any problems or questions on how to link your payment gateways with your HeroTill, please do not hesitate to contact us on support@herotill.com

For any other queries relating to failed transactions, PIN credits, failed authentications,  card verifications, pending or processed payments, payment allocations, please go to http://1voucher.co.za/

New functionality: SendGrid

 We’ve added the ability send mails via SendGrid to HeroTill, which is done via an http-based API instead of an smtp connection.

Why use SendGrid?

As you can see, SendGrid is a great tool to use to ensure better delivery and reporting and control of your sent messages.

Setting up SendGrid

We have put together this  SendGrid setup guide to ensure the mail delivery and mail tracking is correctly configured

 Important things to remember:

• sendmail uses the local server’s own sendmail service to deliver mail. Please ensure that it is configured correctly to allow mail delivery.
• smtp uses the settings defined below to deliver mail via an external mail server.
• The remote SMTP server needs to be configured to accept smtp connections from this host.
• SendGrid uses API settings defined below to deliver mail via a third-party http API service. An active account with https://sendgrid.comis required for this to work

Requirements for setting up SendGrid

• a subscription with Sendgrid is required for this API to work
• For an optimal spam score custom DNS entries needs to be configured
• This new functionality requires a composer update to install the SendGrid library.
• *At the same time the hybridauth composer library is being downgraded from v3 to v2 to ensure compatibility with DT2.0
• A webhook on SendGrid’s side will automatically update the maillog on the HeroTill side should an email bounce after SendGrid has delivered it. This will result in the mail being marked as failed at that point in time.
• A new “Bounced” column and mail status has been added to show mails that were bounced after they were marked as “Delivered”. The bounce functionality will only be used by SendGrid.
• The existing SMTP and sendmail delivery mechanisms do not support bounce detection
• to get delivery and open notifications to work a webhook needs to be registered in the SendGrid config. this webhook must point to /api/v1/sendgrid_webhook
• In the sangria portal (https://app.sendgrid.com/settings/mail_settings) go to Settings, Mail Settings, and enable event notifications. Use the url as indicated above for the webhook.
• Note that the relevant actions to check includes Dropped, Delivered, Bounced, Opened, etc
• Note that each time you update the mail sending options in DataTill the webhook settings will automatically be configured via an API call to SendGrid

Webhook settings

 Go to www.sendgrid.com, register and create an account for yourself. Click on Integrate using our Web API or SMTP relay when you are done.

The following menu will appear:

Select SMTP Relay. You will see the following screen:

Give your API key a name, preferably something that is easy to identify. Click on create key to generate your key.

This key is essentially your password. Copy it somewhere safely, because SendGrid will not allow you to view your key again.

Check that you’ve updated my settings and click on verify integration.

Setting up SendGrid in HeroTill 

Get your API Key ready. In HeroTill, go to Settings–> System Settings–>SMTP settings. Set the SMTP Protocol to SendGrid. and paste the key that you have just generated into the API key box.

Ensure that mail open Detection is switched to yes and click on update when you are done.

Testing

To test your integration in HeroTill, go to Tools–> Messages–> Send message.

Choose a customer, enter their email address and press send.

If your message was sent successfully, it will look like this:

Here on the message log we can see that it was successfully delivered.

Testing in SendGrid

In SendGrid, go to verify integration:

If it has worked, you will receive this message:

To check the details of this message, go to Activity on the left bottom menu.

The Activity feed will open and show you your message’s details.

And that is it! If you have any further queries or feedback, please contact us on support@herotill.com

*Please note that this feature is currently only available for Cell C Fixed LTE services.

There is now integration to the fixed LTE Coverage Map to enable customers and admin users to determine upfront if the service can be provided in the required area.

When applying online, the customer can enter his address and confirm the GPS coordinates to have the system automatically perform an LTE coverage check and display the results.

Similarly, when an admin user creates a lead, the GPS coordinates need to be confirmed with the customer so that the coverage check can be done before continuing with the process:

When a Data Account for the LTE service is added to a customer directly, the registration process will perform a coverage check and will be blocked if either the GPS coordinates are not available, or if LTE coverage in the area cannot be provided by the Service Provider.

The Data Account widget on the Customer Profile also allows for coverage checking for added LTE services:

Author and Developer: JD Obeholster

The purpose of this guide is to introduce the LTE Cancellation Cut-off Date functionality.

IS currently bills its LTE services one month ahead. This means that there may be discrepancies depending on when your customers cancel their services. HeroTill has implemented a cutoff date mechanism to improve LTE cancellations on HeroTill.

Requirements:

• The LTE module needs to be enabled on your HeroTill installation
• The following permissions are required for you to see the menu as well as save the cutoff date settings (System Read and System Write)

In order to configure the LTE Cancellation Cut-off Date, Navigate to the Data Menu-> LTE Setup -> IS API Setup Menu.

Read more

There are two Methods for calculating Roll-Over for Top-ups in HeroTill.
Please see the explanation and calculation for both to assist you in choosing the correct one for your company  

These settings can be found under the menu Data -> Radius Settings -> Radius Setup 

Method 1 Calculate all months together 

If this Method is selected it will calculate all months as one Value. 

The following Calculation is done for a 10 Month Top-up Roll-Over for November. 

All 10 Months get calculated together, the client used a total of 1100GB out of his 1000GB Usage for 10 Months, the 100GB the client bought at the start (That is not used, Regardless) gets added to the total Limit meaning the following: 

1100 – 1000 + 100 = 0 

Method 2 Calculate each month individually 

If this Method is selected it will calculate all months Apart. 

The following Calculation is done for a 10 Month Top-up Roll-Over for November. 

All 10 Months get calculated apart, the client used a total of 1100GB out of his 1000GB Usage for 10 Months, the 100GB the client bought at the start (Was not used during that month) and gets added as the top-up 

100GB Top-up not used in January meaning November gets 100GB Top-up Roll-Over, during the months any data being used of the 100GB will become less and less each Roll-over. 

So, due to 100GB Data in January, this will carry over to November.

Note the following additional information: 

• Data Roll-Over is not Accumulative, meaning Data will not double. 
• In the above scenario, the remaining data in January will fall away when Roll-Over is calculated for December as it falls outside 10 Months. 

To enable the ability for Soft-Cap Data Products to be considered for Roll-Over the following must be implemented:

1. The setting to allow the system to consider this needs to be enabled.

This can be found under Data -> Radius Setup -> Radius Settings

With this setting enabled, the system will account for Soft-Cap accounts when doing Roll-Over.

Please see the following documentation related to setting up Categories and Data Products:
https://support.herotill.com/icasa-setting-up-data-rollover-using-data-products/

https://support.herotill.com/setting-up-data-rollover-using-customer-categories/

HeroTill has released an improvement to the Unknown Devices Report with version 1.5.01.

First, there are a few things the user needs to be aware of concerning this report:

• The report is automatically set to default to a 3 hour window period.
• HeroTill recommends that users leave this as the default setting.
• The reason HeroTill recommends, this is due to the processing time and resources taken to generate the report. Changing the default settings will result in slower processing speeds.

Users are now able to individually enable the Igore setting to choose which device IPs must be excluded from the Unknown Devices Report.

Once this setting has been enabled per device, the user can then view the list view and filter between All Ip Addresses, Ignored IPs and Non Ignored IPs.

If customers have auto top settings on then they have opted into out-of-bundle billing. To opt in or out of out-of-bundle billing the customer can manage this setting in the customer portal by navigating to Usage -> Auto top-up



They can then enable the settings as seen below:

• Auto top-up increments
• Auto top-up limits
• enabling notifications for auto top-ups

Alternatively, clients can make a request to the wisp to turn this on or off. The admin user can navigate to the customer’s edit page -> View usage -> Auto top-up settings

If you would like to remove the functionality for customers to do this on the customer portal, you can turn the setting off.
Navigate to Data -> Radius setup -> Radius settings -> Allow end user auto top ups



As mentioned in the description. If disabled, the setting will only hide the auto popups button for customers on the portal. It will not disable the auto top-up functionality itself or remove the functionality from customers who have it set up.

Data Transfers have been considered for Prepaid Data Users.

 

Read more

Data Rollovers can be managed for Individual Packages using the Edit Data Products feature. If you would rather manage rollover settings on a Customer level, please refer to this blog instead: ICASA: Setting up Data Rollover using Customer Categories.

NOTE: If both the Data Product and Customer Category Roll over settings are enabled, the data product rollover settings will take precedence. (Wisps are encouraged to only use the rollover settings on individual products)

Any data (monthly and /or top-ups) which is rolled over from this setting will appear as an auto rolled over top-up on the customer profile:

Read more

To apply a specific customer category to a bulk list of customers, follow the steps below on how to import a CSV list to customer categories:

Step 1: Export your Customer Account Codes

• • Navigate to Customers -> List customers

• • Show hide the correct column “Account codes”
  • Show “all” Rows
  • Export to CSV

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Data Rollovers can be managed for customers using the customer categories feature. If you would rather manage rollover settings on a product level, please refer to this blog instead: ICASA: Setting up Data Rollover using Data Products

NOTE: If both the Data Product and Customer Category Roll over settings are enabled, the data product rollover settings will take precedence. (Wisps are encouraged to only use the rollover settings on individual products)

Any data (monthly and /or top-ups) which is rolled over from this setting will appear as an auto rolled over top-up on the customer profile:

Read more

HeroTill has added a new monthly reporter for figures generated from the Lead to Receipt process. This report includes comprehensive dropdowns, graphs and data point summaries.

This report can be located by navigating to Reports > Statistics > Sales Lead Invoice Report.

It is important to note, that the report works on a monthly/ month to month basis. The Date Picker is specifically geared to allow the user to choose date ranges for the last 3 months, 6 months, 12 months and custom month to month ranges.

The Data Point summaries on the left, displays the number of data products linked by their commission categories.

When hovering over the graph information, the user is able to see trends in fugures as well as overall totals for the following:

• Number of Paid Sales Invoices
• Number of Sales Invoices
• Non Recurring (revenue) total
• Recurring Ex VAT total
• Bandwidth Ex VAT total
• Bandwidth Job Card Ex VAT total

This report also has a comprehensive dropdown, which allows the user the ability to expand (and collapse) the data to analyse the full break down of each figure per invoice.

During the festive period, we noticed a few of our customers had not changed their VAT settings to the increased 15 %, effective from 01 April 2018.

It is important to note that any invoices issued from this date onwards (01 April 2018) must be charged at 15 % VAT.

If you make use of VAT within HeroTill, please ensure that the following settings are correct:

Step 1: To confirm that your HeroTill is set to use VAT, navigate to Billing > Billing Setup > Billing Setup. The following two settings should be enabled.

Step 2: For customers that use the Sage One Accounting Integration, you will need to check the following settings on your Sage One Account.

You will need to add two new “Standard Rate” VAT rates in Sage One. You will do this by navigating to Company > Change Company Settings > VAT Settings.

Add “14 % Standard Rate” and “15 % Standard Rate” and Save and Close. You will need to ensure that these new rates are synced correctly back to HeroTill – but we will cover this step in further down.

Step 3: In HeroTill you will need to make sure your VAT rates are correctly synced with Sage One.

To do this, navigate to Billing > Billing Setup > Default Tax Rates > click on the button to Sync Tax Rates. Once the pop up appears, click on Sync to proceed.

Step 4:  This step is crucial to the VAT setup as it will ensure that the correct VAT rate will be billed. Once the sync has completed, you will need to check your VAT settings to ensure that they are correct. You should have at least two VAT rates listed now.

• The effective date for the 15 % VAT Rate should be 01.04.2018. Please edit your date if necessary to reflect this.
• The effective date for any other VAT Rate should all be prior to 01.04.2018 and not equal to or greater than this.
• Validation has been added to ensure that there cannot be duplicate Effective Dates for VAT Rates.
• Please check that the Tax Rate % matches the Accounting Tax Name.(The Accounting Tax Name should match what was created in Step 1.  If this does not match please edit the record and select the correct the Accounting Tax Name.
• It is extremely important to note, that if the incorrect Accounting Tax Name is linked to a Tax Rate, this will cause serious VAT descrepancies and will require manual data capturing to correct.
• If the user fails to setup the VAT Rates on this page, the system will look at the Default Tax Type setup under the Accounting Integration menu. (However, if the Default Tax Type is set up here and under the Default Tax Rates menu, the system will use the settings from the Default Tax Rates menu by default.

Step 5: Do spot checks on your billing documents and Products. 

Before pushing any billing documents to Sage One, individually or through the Month End Process, do spot checks on your billing documents to ensure the correct 15 % VAT Rate is being used by default.

HeroTill will also be introducing a new improvement to the VAT Type dropdown on all billing documents. The user will now see invalid VAT types that should not be used, in red text. Valid VAT types will be displayed in normal text.

You may view the previous VAT blog from March 2018, by clicking on the link here.

Please feel free to contact our Support Call Centre, should you need any assistance with checking your VAT setup.

Circuit / Caller ID on Data Accounts

HeroTill has added a few improvements to the Data Accounts menu.

A new column, Circuit ID (enabled under the Show/Hide Columns button) can now be displayed on the Data Accounts list view.

The Circuit ID for Telkom radius accounts will be auto-collected from the active radius session. For other radius accounts (wireless Services) the Caller ID or MAC address is collected and stored in this field.

The Caller ID / Circuit ID shows on the customer’s:

• data account widget,
• the active session widget and
• the recently closed session widget

Read more

HeroTill has introduced a new Dark Theme throughout the entire system.

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When attempting to sync your Sage One data with HeroTill, a few issues may arise due to the following scenarios:

• A customer already exists in Sage One when trying to sync the customer from HeroTill.
• Syncing a customer with an invalid email address format.
• Existing Sage One Integration ID is different to the HeroTill Integration ID.
• A very rare case, where the same Customer code exists as duplicates.

These issues will prevent the sync from taking place and an error message/log will be visible.

HeroTill has now improved the Sage One Sync Queue, to include automatic fixes and proposed solutions for common errors.

In the example below, you will see records that were not sucessfully synced now have a new orange tool icon next to them.

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Support for LFTP Backups

HeroTill has introduced the FTP backup setting to allow for the use of the external third party LFTP library.

When the user navigates to Setup >  System Settings > System Backups > under the FTP Settings | FTP Method, the user will now see the option “LFTP (Linux lftp client)” as an available option to choose from.

All mandatory fields below this option must be filled in correctly, to ensure successful backups.

With the release of 1.4.03 Hotfix 3, an Advanced Mode switch has been introduced as well. The Advanced Mode will allow the user to add additional flags/custom settings to the LFTP command. An example of this is when the destination FTP server requires SSL verification to be disabled for a connection to succeed.