Conference Call Billing

We are looking at possibly using jbilling to generate conference call invoices. The conference bridge generates call detail records CDRs as well as conference detail records (CODRs) and these can be either pulled from a DB or generated as CSV files. The CDRs contain infomation about the caller and each CDR contains a unique conference ID which references the associated CODR. The CODRs contain general conference information, total conference minutes, start time, end time, and any advanced options (conference recording). The invoice should have the general conference info as well as participant info. Billing is done per conference and is basically the addition of all conference participants multiplied by the time they spent in the conference plus any conference specific charges. For example, if there were 5 people in a conference for an hour that would be 600 minutes. Also, the CDR's tell us if the call was a dial-in or dial-out which have different charges associated with it. We are thinking that we could modify the Asterisk plugin for this. So the question is does this make sense or is there a better way to do this?

Also, there may be a company that has multiple accounts on the system and we would want to bundle all the conferences and accounts together into one unified invoice for that company.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Art

pcasal wrote 2 years 36 weeks ago

Hi Art, Your case does not

Hi Art,

Your case does not look much different than many other cases that I've worked on and implemented with jBilling. I don't think you need to modify any plug-ins here, just configure a reader to match the format that you have, I guess that this is what you mean by 'modifying the asterisk plug-in).

The mediation rules should determine the account involved in the call, and the product that maps to that call. With item management rules you handle any bundles or pre-paid stuff, then just use pricing rules (usually in a decision table), to price the call.

For multiple accounts per customer, use children accounts. Then the parent company gets one invoice with all the charges from the sub-accounts.

Regards,

Paul Casal
jbilling

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