sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Vodavi Telephones & Systems Call Accounting

We are looking at writing our own call accounting program for a customer. We have tried two different programs and have not been really impressed for the cost for what you get in performance. We now just do a text capture and manipulate the data in Access. The thought of possibly making this a commercial product came up and I felt I should get feedback from the best in the business and most helpful folks I know.
Without getting into details, it would be web based as far as creating the reports, charts and all that stuff. The backend will be a standalone device (or PC) that would capture the SMDR.
Before we get crazy and go public with this, I was just thinking about using the forum as a sounding board to see if there is a market for something that would be lightweight, easy to use, and that should be relatively inexpensive when compared to current systems; and if we do decide to go live, if anyone was interested in testing and providing feedback and recommendations.

I too am less than impressed with current call accounting packages. If you have the ability to write the code and have a REASONABLE cost then there is room in the market for it. I wouldn't limit it to just Vodavi however...have several folks give you samples of their vendor SMDR/CDR raw data output and make it available to other makes.

If this is for more than just Vodavi, You may want to post this in the General or Installer forums. I’d be willing to be a beta site…

The biggest problem I see with call accounting is that all the current products have to much fluff for the common user who just wants basic reporting as in who made the call what number was called and how long were the on the call. The older stuff for departments and call costing I would think is mostly a thing of by gone days when WATS lines were prevailent. Now with the cost of long distance beimg what it is call costing is a minor factor.

Just my 2 cents

I totally agree with you. 99% of my customers who I've sold call accounting software to in the past several years just want to know who is calling what numbers, how many calls, how long per call. The rest they never bother with and just complicates things for them.

As for right now, we are just looking at Vodavi since that is about 90% of our customer base and the only customers that really request any type of call accounting. Plus, we will build one for an XTS site and we can just replicate it with little work. As a former customer I totally understand about the fluff and unneeded complexity of current systems. We just want to give the customer something that is easy.

As far as adding other systems, the data capture process is going to be the same, we will just have to parse the data differently and should not be an issue, but will be down the road a little bit and added as we can get examples of the SMDR layouts. Once we see what this entails, I will surely start getting feedback for other systems.

Thanks a lot and any feedback is greatly appreciated.

90% of our base is Vodavi too. for what it's worth, we get few requests for CA but I would be willing to buy a low priced CA with fewer features than the cheapest Callwhere Lite. More options add to the price and learning curve. We tried making our own too but never got it quite right. Most of our applications are simply agent call reports to document how much inbound/outbound phone time the agents are putting in. Having a list of phone numbers serves mainly to identify personal calls. We have never needed call costing. Let that be the domain of the overpriced ones.

I am getting way ahead of our programmer and our component builder, but we have come up with a preliminary list of searches and reports. It is viewable at: https://docs.google.com/View?id=dgbsnns6_26g9w2rfp9

Comments and Suggestions are more than welcome.