How to use Berezin Technologies Friends and Family software

To read up on why I wrote this, please read my blog post on the subject.

Here is the latest version of the installer.

Download Executable

Run the setup until it is done. Then, get your call data off of the Verizon Wireless website as described in the next step.

How to get the data from the Verizon Wireless Website into the program:

Login to your Verzon Wireless account at http://www.verizonwireless.com and navigate to the following screen:

The key things to look at in your Bill Details screen are the Bill Period pull down and the Phone number (Voice Details for) pull down. Choose each of the phones in your plan (I have four), and choose the billing period(s) you are interested in looking at. Make sure you use all of your phones for each period you are interested in, and click "Download to Spreadsheet" for each Phone Number/Billing Period combination. Each time you click, the Berezin Technologies Friends and Family Minutes Calculator will pop up. Be patient as this can take a while if Verizon's website is slow, or you have a slow computer. If you click more than once, don't worry about it because we filter out duplicate calls. After downloading the last bit of data you are interested in, you can stay in the Berezin Technologies Friends and Family Minutes Calculator.

How to interpret the data:

You should then see a screen that looks similar to this screen:

By scrolling through the numbers and choosing an auto-lookup option, you can automatically do reverse lookups on each number. This is very handy for remembering who is who, expecially for most people who let their cell phones remember the numbers for them. You can use this to determine if the callers high on the list are still callers you plan to call a lot in the future, and hence want to add them to your precious 5 or 10 friends and family callers. I used this program to select my top minutes-users and reduced my Verizon Wireless plan significantly and saved hundreds of dollars per year.

The program will continue to accumulate call information as you use it. For this reason select the "Configuration" tab and blank out the data periodically by selecting "Delete all Calls and Exit". Otherwise you may get some misleading information out of the program if looking at very old calling data.