One thing I have not touched on yet is what we use for billing our members, accounting, etc.

My day job is doing software development (http://smalldognet.com), and one of the products I created is software to run community foundations.  This includes a full blown online fund accounting system, credit card processing, customers, donors, AR, AP, checks, etc, etc.

So, I already had software we could use to keep the books, all I needed to add was an “ISP” module that tracked the different radio’s, determined if a radio was backbone equipment, or member equipment.

The DBIUA Network module keeps track of everything, helps with the programming of the radio’s, and also feeds the nagios monitoring system.  When we add someone new to the DBIUA Network module, this automatically gets pushed out to nagios.

This system tracks the location of everything as well (latitude/longitude), and so we can also spit out a physical map of the network and how everything is connected.

The best part of this is really the automatic billing each month.  My software is already setup to integrate with Stripe payment processing (http://stripe.com), and so we have a page where members can login, and give us a credit card.  This is not saved in our system, but instead is saved over at Stripe.  At the first of each month, I press a button that automatically creates invoices for everyone.  Then another button charges everyones credit card using the data saved at Stripe.

I’m sure some of you are thinking, this would be really cool to use for your own WISP.  Maybe you are using Quickbooks or something and your monthly billing is a total PITA.  For now, you will have to continue to suffer, but maybe in the future I will figure out how to make this available to others as well, but right now it is very DBIUA centric.