A live demonstration of the default start page on a hosted call accounting site
is available here.
Basics
As telephone calls are completed your PBX sends information about your calls to the PBX SMDR port.
The SMDR port on your PABX can be connected to a computer and received by SMDR software
for recording, analysis and reporting.
Each SMDR (Station Messaging Detail Record) also known as CDR (Call Detail Record) contains information
about the call such as; the extension on which the call occurred;
the duration of the call and the telephone number dialed.
Each PBX manufacturer usually uses a different PBX information format. SMDR call record information may be recorded as a single line of text
per call, two or more lines of information or even a page of information detailing the call.
Simple, single line SMDR call accounting records may look something like the following:
2010-09-03 06:11 00:02 101 01 O95551234
2010-09-03 06:21 00:15 103 02 I
2010-09-03 06:24 00:23 106 09 I
2010-09-03 06:25 00:07 101 01 O95551235
Different PBXes may have different settings to turn different parts of the SMDR information on or off. Some PBXes
may not display incoming calls at all, if they do they won't unless your telephone provider supplies caller ID.
A simple solution?
Over the years many different SMDR software providers have created many different call accounting solutions.
Some systems have been designed from the ground up to be a commercial product, others have started life 'in-house'
to provide a SMDR call accounting solution to handle calls for their own business.
As SMDR software solutions are created developers discover that writing SMDR software starts as a very simple exercise.
Extracting call duration, start time and phone number can be a simple exercise for a simple PBX type. But as other
call accounting features such as multi-part and abandoned calls and other PBXes are supported by the
SMDR call accounting software developers discover that the processing of calls is not the simple exercise they originally thought them to be.
As SMDR software is put into use users often discover that a lot of calls are quickly recorded by the software.
A simple SMDR call accounting software solution records each call in a database (as it should) without any thought
to how the calls will be used. To keep costs low an inexpensive or free database solution is often used
and as the number of SMDR records in the database increases the performance of the SMDR software can rapidly decline.
A typical 'solution' to SMDR call accounting software becoming slow is to delete SMDR records from the software database.
This may seem like a solution but it prevents long-term and historic reports and comparison reports being run.
After a short while cheap solutions provide more problems:
- as the number of records increase reporting and even time to log in increases
- some reports take so long to run the user guides may recommend to NOT use some reports
- to 'fix' slow reports the user guide says to delete 'old' records
- using a cheap or free database there are few or no database tools
- daily backups are required to be performed by you
- when you need the SMDR software you discover the system hasn't been operating
Business expenses
When purchasing an SMDR software solution a cheap solution might seem like an easy fix to a quick-and-dirty
requirement. Remember the adage 'you get what you pay for'. Many SMDR software applications although billed as
industrial strength, ultimate or up-to-date when installed may look like a school project. If the user interface
has a 'school project' look about it the core of the solution is likely to be the same.
One of the prime features of SMDR software is to discover the cost of the outgoing telephone calls. However,
some call accounting solutions have this turned off by default. If call costing is supported often the bare minimum
requirements are supported.
If a SMDR software solution is being used to calculate call cost (after all that is one of the primary reasons for installing
SMDR call accounting software) a number of reports can be used to discover costly call areas and reduce business expenses.
Typical call cost discovery and recovery reports include:
- trunk utilization or 'all trunks busy' report to determine unused telephone lines thereby reducing monthly rental or to discover that the number of telephone lines provided by your supplier is insufficient to handle your customer enquiries
- top calls by cost to discover calls to expensive numbers
- top calls by number dialed to discover frequently dialed numbers to suppliers, customers or non-business calls
- calls to expensive services such as mobile, international or premium numbers
- internal time wasting calls where staff are unnecessarily chatting
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