Hey All,
For any interested, there’s a blog post about the recently released Call Accounting module by @kgupta1 at https://www.freepbx.org/call-accounting-new-freepbx-commercial-module-release/
Feel free to post any questions or comments to these forums.
Hope all of you are doing well, and best wishes!
Matthew Fredrickson
Some questions that the wiki does not seem to cover…
Coming from a retirement village scenario, applicable to perhaps mining camps as well -
Is there an ability to, say if this is run once a month, mark the extensions to 0 (paid), keeping history? Allowing us to interrogate the database on a per user basis and charge them.
Can resident extensions view their call cost (monthly bill) history in UCP?
Is payment gateway an option that they can pay directly via UCP?
Is there an auto trunk suspension if they dont pay within X number of days? (I say trunk because they should of course have unfettered internal call usage)
(I expect some people will say go use PMS module, but theres a few problems with that argument that is not for this thread)
I guess the lack of response means “no” to all the above…
The most complete answer (AFAIC) is to give the Hospitality module a try. It would seem match your requirements closely and @danardf is a proud papa, so he’s always willing to discuss his favorite module.
If the module is missing facility for your use, the path to satisfaction runs through the Feature Request process.
The short answer is that this is a “call accounting” module, not a full-blown call rating and billing engine. It simply helps you assign calls from particular users or trunks to a particular rate code, and provides some basic reporting and data exporting tools.
If you want billing functionality, you should look at billing engines. You can easily export the data from the Call Accounting module (or just the straight CDRs, if you’re so inclined) and run them through a billing engine.
PMS modules doesn’t manage any payment in advance to limit the calls. I mean if you want to pay $10 in advance and once $10 of calls has been done, the phone is locked.
With PMS you can call as you like and paid all when checked out. Whatever the number of calls you did.
The management for Hotel is different for Hospital or retirement home / village. Even if there’s a common part similar.
I worked for 26 years with call accounting software and software managme for retirement home. All was different.
Sometime, if you spent $5 instead of $10, you could lose $5
In other retirement home, you will just add $5 or nothing a month… Depend of the situation.
When checkout some retirement home was able to pay back what you paid in advance if no call was done. sometimes not.
This kind of management can be complex
Thanks @danardf I did not think PMS would be appropriate module.
Thanks @jsmith, it seems the module is not what we hoped for then, yes exporting for etc could be done, if there was a full time person in each establishment capable, most the places I deal with dont let their normal IT person touch the phone systems so looks like this module isnt suitable.
In reporting this to a prospective new retirement village almost built (900 duplexes) I was asked how do voip provides do it, I told them the common software they use for SIP services, and have been asked to install that product, so freepbx lost another one to Broad…
I’ll keep an eye on updates to this module in case one day it can compete with B…S… Freepbx is a dream to manage compared to that #%$@! thing