Help Generating a Bill

cardy_c · December 28, 2011, 12:03am

We are several small business in a building sharing one FreePBX 2.7.0.10 as a gateway to the PSTN

We would like to be able to automatically generate a bill for each business every month. Ideally it would be generated using the inbound calls to DID’s and the Outbound calls generated from particular CIDs.

Is there a nice and simple way to do this??

I have been looking for days and cannot find a simple solution. I have ended up several times looking at and installing a2Billing in a test environment but I think it’s way overkill and to be honest I can’t get it working. I don’t need calling card type control, I don’t need to turn people on and off if they are late with a payment I just need to be able to present a statement of call usage to each party in the building that is reasonably reliable.

Anyone and ideas??

Thanks

brk · December 28, 2011, 3:19am

I don’t do it, but I can pull that info out of my call detail reports from my SIP trunk provider, using grep, awk, or excel. It has the advantage of being exactly what one is being billed for.

SkykingOH · December 28, 2011, 3:38am

It’s not simple but a2billing works. Each group could also have their own trunk and get the provider bill

cardy_c · December 28, 2011, 3:44am

I know I could do it that way but it’s going to be time consuming and subject to human error. My provider does not support sub accounts either, just one IP address authenticating the lot.

I was thinking I’d like to have an automated system in place.

I thought it would have been very simple, that there would have been lots of solutions already available but I guess maybe not.

Thanks for the reply.

brk · December 28, 2011, 3:53am

The call logs are all in mysql database with freepbx. Wouldn’t be too hard to create a cron job to dump the data regularly. I haven’t looked at the data in detail, but all the info is there. Looks to me like it would require two queries, one for incoming and one for outgoing.

cardy_c · December 28, 2011, 3:58am

I guess I’ll keep trying to get it running.

My skills are limited - I am using this install script.

github.com

amontalban/A2Billing-Install-Script/blob/master/a2billing_setup.sh

#!/bin/bash

#####################################################################
#
#
#	Created by Andres Montalban - amontalban <AT> globalitss.com
#	Last update - 07-11-2013
#
#
#####################################################################

####################### CONFIGURATION VALUES #########################

A2BILLING_VERSION="v1.9.4"
LIBOPENR2_VERSION="1.3.2-1"
WORK_DIRECTORY="/usr/src"
OK_MSG="\E[1;32m[OK]"
ERROR_MSG="\E[1;31m[ERROR]"
LOG_FILE="/var/log/a2billing_install"
ADDITIONAL_PACKAGES="php php-mcrypt php-gd php-mysql php mysql-server patch dos2unix gettext"

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Then following this tutorial:

http://sysadminman.net/blog/2009/getting-started-with-a2billing-part-1-setting-up-a-trunk-447

cardy_c · December 28, 2011, 4:06am

I am very new to Linux Asterisk Databases etc. I wouldn’t know where to start!!
I was hoping all that would have been done already and a "How To’ posted somewhere.

SkykingOH · December 28, 2011, 5:19am

I don’t know anything about the script. Without Linux and Asterisk skills you are going to be lost. Closed source billing packages are very expensive.

I would suggest going over the a2billing site and having them set it up for you. Last time I checked they charged under $1000.00 Joe Roper and his team do great work.