Setting up SMS

To activate SMS, please contact support@udiosystems.com so we can send an agreement over for you to review and sign.

SMS credits must be paid using the credit card that is entered into Udio.

See bottom of page for details on how to get started with SMS.

SMS Credits

During transmission, every text message is broken into a number of parts; each part of the message consumes one SMS credit. 

When submitting messages for transmission, Udio estimates the number of parts each text message will be broken into and deducts SMS credits accordingly from the account balance. 

After transmission, the receiving mobile operator through our SMS provider will provide Udio with the actual number of parts each message was broken into. This number of parts can be higher than Udio estimated, or, in rare cases, lower. Udio will adjust the number of credits deducted for each message after this information is made available. It can take up to 24 hours after the message is sent for this information to be transmitted and processed by Udio.

The process of breaking the message into parts varies between mobile operators and is not under Udio’s control. But in general, it is as follows: 

  • If the whole message contains only English characters and simple symbols, each part can contain up to 160 characters. This is the best case scenario. To achieve this. ensure that the message does not contain ‘typographic’ quotes, umlauts and non-english characters. 
  • If in any part of the message there are non-english characters or special symbols, each part can contain up to 80 characters. ‘Special symbols’ can include letters with dots or dashes above them, non-english letters, special quotes, mathematical characters, typographic, non-breakable spaces from Microsoft Word and some special line breaks.
  • If in any part of the message there are ‘emojis’ or hieroglyphs (from Japanese, Chinese, Korean or similar languages), each part can contain up to 40 characters.

‘Characters’ refer to every visible and non-visible symbol, including spaces. To avoid accidentally consuming too many SMS credits by, for example, including special characters, avoid copying and pasting text messages from word processing applications, such as Microsoft Word, Apple Pages and Google Docs. Some characters and formatting can be transferred in this way and dramatically reduce the allowed number of characters in each message part.

Billing

SMS' are charged on a length basis, where one SMS credit equals 160 characters (max). For example, if each SMS costs 0.10c, an SMS of 180 characters long will cost 0.20c as it uses two SMS credits.

Udio will only charge if the message has successfully been submitted to our SMS provider.

You may be charged for failed deliveries if our SMS provider successfully submits the SMS to a destination carrier (e.g. Telstra or Optus), but that carrier reports that you attempted to send a message to an invalid phone number. Phone numbers can be invalid for several reasons, such as the phone number you've entered in Udio doesn't exist; you have attempted to send too many similar messages to that phone in the recent past; the message has been flagged as spam; etc.

Our SMS provider only publishes usage reports once per day. Udio reads these reports and verifies the charges Udio has calculated to your account match the charges from our SMS provider. If there is a difference, your credits will be adjusted and you may gain or lose some credits.

Purchasing

SMS' must be pre-purchased if Udio has enabled your SMS functionality

Once SMS is enabled, you will be required to pre-purchase credits in blocks of 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 3000, 5000, 10000. 

To view remaining credits:

  • Go to 'settings' under accounts, click  'Udio accounts'
  • Before you purchase, make sure your credit card details are current
  • Click on 'purchase' and select the number of SMS credits you'd like to buy
  • Read the terms of service and tick 'confirm & purchase'

If your account has 10 or fewer SMS credit remaining or any SMS that has failed in the last 24 hours due to insufficient credits, a notification banner with advice on this information will be displayed to any users with the 'change account settings' permission at the top of all Udio webpages.

Functionality

Udio can check phone numbers are in the valid format expected by our SMS provider. If the phone number can't be checked, the message wont be submitted to our SMS provider and you wont be charged.

Udio will always try to send the SMS to the relevant person.

If a person does not have a valid phone number, Udio will send an SMS to the first valid phone number found under the bill payer(s). Where a user has multiple phone numbers, Udio will attempt to send an SMS to their first valid phone.

Udio will trim all SMS' over 500 characters (including the prepended facility/account name in countries where SMS sender ID is not supported) y adding an ellipsis (...) to prevent large unexpected charges.

Note: Line spaces are counted as characters and non-English characters (such as emojis, umlauts and letters with accent marks) may be counted as more than one character.

Permissions

To update your permissions:

  • Go to 'settings' and select 'configure login permissions' under 'users'
  • Tick 'SMS send' and 'SMS templates and mass SMS' under the appropriate group(s)

Setting up SMS

To get started with SMS:

  • Go to 'settings' and under 'facilities' click ' configure facilities'
  • Select your facility and click 'edit facility' in the top right
  • Update 'SMS sender ID' (usually your business name); the ID needs to be between 3 and 11 characters and only contain letters and numbers

If the facility the SMS is sent from has no SMS sender ID, Udio will automatically use the first 11 characters of your Udio account's name, stripping out any characters that do not conform to the above character requirement. 

For example, 'Udio Swim School' will become 'UdioSwimSch', 'Swim Safe!' will become 'SwimSafe'. 

SMS sender IDs are not supported in many regions, including New Zealand and the USA. In these cases, SMS’ will arrive from a generic send name, e.g. 'NOTICE' and each SMS will be prepended with the facility name (if SMS sender ID is set) or the account name, e.g. SWIMSAFE: Thanks for booking..... <rest of message>.