Mobile Balance: More than just a cost control

State of balance money / included minutes from mobile operator interest almost everyone. Few exceptions: unlimited calling to fixed monthly fee and credit TA-paid communication services. You can, of course, keep the account a couple of hundred USD and do not bother cost control, but for most of us is a "solution" is unacceptable. Yes, and the deposit interest operators do not pay, although it could do something like progressive discounts depending on the amount of down payment. The first attempt of this kind can be considered a 15 percent bonus on every second installment in Bee +, but this is a topic for another conversation.

Each operator has provided several ways to carefully monitor the state of accounts and expenses. SIM-menu, service to query the balance, on-line guides / offices with www-access, etc. Can be regarded as a concern about the subscriber, even though in reality it is rather a concern that we did not forget to replenish your account. With all the variety of controls at each of them has a number of "innate" deficiencies, including one general: lack of automated data collection and initial analysis of data. Specialized software suite Mobile Balance not only successfully solves this problem, but also provides a number of additional service amenities and features.

Why and who needs it

Most users do not really need - is enough relevant information about the state of balance at the time of the request, the benefit of this information is immediately available on the phone. However, these same figures for n-number of days it possible to estimate the monthly average flow of money, the average traffic, and many other parameters. Including and take sensible decision to move to a particular plan. Considerable amount of the desired statistics are already collected and available on the website operator only need these statistics to extract, to make the database and organize. In addition, the site can get information on multiple accounts - just register and record the corresponding numbers. Mobile Balance as time and allows you to completely automate this process, while saving 60-90% of Internet traffic. But the convenience and clarity of information functions of the program are not limited to - Mobile Balance can calculate averages of costs and build a variety of graphics. A detailed description and the latest version of the program - site developers.

What Can Mobile Balance

Nor in any way trying to belittle the merits of the program note: most of the information is generated based on data extracted from the websites of the operators. However, obtained the raw numbers are processed, entered into the database and displayed on the screen as a visual and easy-to-work tables. The program accessed the site operators directly, without loading graphics, banner ads and other "decorations", the number of requests (in case of temporary unavailability of the site), user-configurable. Mobile Balance works with most Russian mobile operators, with the primary setup just select the desired operator from the list. Work in manual and automatic mode, all settings and types of information displayed on the accounts can be flexibly configured.

Can be conventionally divided into three main parts:

• "Pop up" hint in the tray.When you hover over the icon Mobile Balance, a list of monitored phones (up to ten) with the balance at the time of the last request. You can specify any threshold, at which figure changes color (default - in red).
• Summary table with the results of the last request on all tracked phone (click on the icon in the tray). Set of displayed parameters is set, the rows with neobnovlennyymi data (unsuccessful queries) are highlighted. The same table "works" kind of command console: Right-click on the line with the desired phone number falls out menu with a full set of available commands: seek balance, given a number, look at the history of requests, send an SMS to this number from the site operator and even automatically order a free detailed report (for the numbers of MTS).

• The third block ("History of the balance, by clicking the right button) - the most interesting. Here you can view data tables for all query separately for each account, to generate graphs based on tabular data and automatically calculate and draw a curve the average daily flow of funds, etc. Here we consider the combined figure of total expenditure on all accounts tracked - useful for businesses with more centrally-paid mobile phones. Charts can be zoomed, to build for any desired period, "cut out" the necessary parts, etc. If necessary, a complete history of queries can be exported to Excel, and save the schedule in the form of a drawing or print.

Fly in the ointment

Until recently updated version of Mobile Balance came out almost every two weeks, software system is continuously improved and "overgrown" new features. The latest version (2.48), it seems, already includes everything that you can "stuff" in a similar product - up to automatically check for new software releases. However, one defect of the developers until unable to cope. The problem is that sometimes the results of the query incorrectly written in "strange" table that immediately hopelessly distorts the accumulated statistics. Logic fault trace / understand failed: package of data on loan contracts MTS can be made to the table down prepaid-contract BeeLine and vice versa. Possible ways of solving problems - frequent backups of the entire database (the function is provided) or editing of the database in MS Access. Future versions of Mobile Balance developers promise to provide the ability to delete erroneous entries made directly from the program interface.

What is how much

For the "home-family" use a full-featured version of the program, the only limitation - simultaneously track up to five contracts, which in most cases it is enough for even the most "mobile" family. Paid versions for businesses vary the maximum number of accounts serviced. Options:

Plugins

Features expanded through plug-ins, the number is growing. At present available the following plug-ins:

• Dollar exchange rate of RBC - the current dollar exchange rate. Information from the RBC.
• The euro exchange rate of RBC - the current euro exchange rate. Information from the RBC.
• Russia-On-Line - monitoring the balance of the ISP "ROL".
• STREAM - monitoring the balance of the ISP "STREAM".
• MTU-Intel - monitoring the balance of the ISP MTU-Intel.
• Internet Thermometer - shows the current temperature in Moscow near the subway, "Glade".

Prospects - According to the developers

Plans for the future in one sentence: to deepen and expand.

Deepen to rich, especially analytical, which allows a person in a convenient way to see how money is spent on mobile communications, and how could these costs be reduced.

Expand the connection of new cellular operators and not only. Was recently added support for plug-ins, allowing to receive information from any Internet-based systems.

I'd like to hope that finally something will be concluded partnership agreements with major operators - MTS and Beeline. Now we are working with a megaphone, sonnet, Skylink (in Moscow and St. Petersburg), with several operators in Russia and a developer of billing systems. Subscribers and users of the program, respectively, to cooperate, of course, just win! For example, some figures: to obtain data on the phone connected to the MTS program must be downloaded from the Internet about 70 kilobytes of information (with the Beeline is even worse - almost 150), while for the phone connected to MegaFon (or any of the operators-partners ) of the order of 4 kilobytes. Speed ​​of information also varies by orders of magnitude, there are still a number of advantages.