Trixbox call costing module.

This is not a common request.

Rather than add this to the phone system I would use a database program on another computer (are you comfortable with MS Access maybe?) use SQL to access the CDR's and then apply your costing algorithm.

Do you know how to use the SQL connector in MS Aceess? Have you ever used the scripting language? All of your requirements can be met with an Access script.

I suggest you install the tbm-mysqladmin module and have a look at the CDR database structure to get familiar with the data.

There are also commercial call costing systems that can work with Asterisk CDR's.

This will definitely help. I am implementing it in my LAB now, and will give feed back to this forum as soon as I am done. Sometimes someone just needs a push in the right direction, it is kind of difficult researching something if:

a) You don't know the solution exists.
b) If someone points you in the right direction, at least you can research it knowingly that it exists.

But coming back to what johnf said, company’s wants to know how much a particular call costs them. In this one example, I had an employee of a company that racked up a bill of (converting it to dollars) $250 to one particular number, because he had girlfriend issues. If this company did not have this particular phone system, with this particular call costing module, it would have been money the company would have had to pay. Now, if you have 50 employees, and only 25 follow his example, well, you do the maths.

Companies want to be in control of all their monthly costs and overheads. Giving them a system that can make them feel in control, will sell the system to them based on that feature alone. At first, I thought having pin codes on the phone system would have been enough, at least you know who made the particular call. But this "password" gets passed around, "sometimes I think that is where the word password got it's name from, from being passed around" it was not long after I implemented pin codes, that the cleaning people could not use the phones any more, or maybe the security staff. They simply asked their friends in the company that they want to phone home, and they simply give them their pin codes.

So with this all happening, people now want to charge their employees for their own personal phone calls. Giving every one pin codes, but keeping them accountable for racking up their own personal phone bills. I had a look at A2Billing a while back, and that is why I mentioned "having a call costing module without the 1000's of features"

I am surprised that Trixbox, who has been on the market for so long does not realise the need for this function. Trixbox is a great program; don't get me wrong, of all the open source products that is out there, Trixbox leads by far in my books. From experience, I just think Trixbox can be even better by saving the companies even more money, by giving them the power to retrieve some of the phone bill costs back from their employees. After all, it is the employees that make part of about 25% of the total company phone bill due to private calls. Is that not what VOIP's all about, saving people money?

Any way, I suppose while things are free we can't complain about basic PABX functionalities.