The Technological Requirements Energizing The Evolution Of Call Accounting

Way back around about 1917 when the PBX was first made commercially available, it did not have automated telephone call restriction features, the owner of the PBX could not enforce any restrictions controlling where an extension could phone, and needless to say the computers needed to create a Call Accounting platform were not available.



At that time a firm installing a PBX was suddenly confronted with a high degree of financial risk. For the first time ever a normal worker was equipped with a phone at the desk, some type of call control came to be a necessary feature of the PBX. This encouraged PBX companies to create call control facilities like call barring but it took until around 1965 before market dynamics lead to the birth of Call Accounting solutions.



In the 1960's and 70's PBX platforms were mechanical. These products had no easy method of creating telephone call details. The Call Accounting supplier attached two wires to every extension and exchange line to monitor the voltage fluctuations on each device, this was called scanning. These events were then written to a storage medium, a tape drive was the normal solution.



At regular intervals the Call Accounting maintenance engineer would attend the clients office, collect the tapes and send them to a data processing facility where the data was reformatted into individual call records and a document containing paper reports was built, bound and delivered to the client.



As electronics developed so did the PBX system. A leap forward in the development of the PBX was the shift away from mechanical switches to electronics, enabling a wave of new capabilities, one of which was the Full Detailed Call Record (or FDCR). The PABX now created a Full Detailed Call Record containing the date, time of day, call duration and extension number making the call, scanner technology suddenly became unnecessary.



In conjunction with the mini-computing industry bringing a flood of new innovations, the entrepreneurial zeal of the Call Accounting fraternity ensured speedy development. In the blink of an eye it was viable to run a whole Call Accounting platform on just one industrial strength computer including data acquisition, call tariffing and report generation.



The next leap forward was the evolution of the Personal Computer, with this innovation Call Accounting packages became a standard management tool. The customer would provide a computer and buy a software product.



Today, with the incorporation of the Internet into standard business operations, Call Accounting solutions have once again evolved into a new solution. Now the most up to date and most powerful Call Accounting products are offered as an Internet application, where a basic call data collection box, is located at the PBX to collect and ship call records to a web platform. The consumer simply logs in to access reports over the web. The entire call accounting product is now offered as a managed service at remarkably reasonable rates.



Today, the high dependability, computing power and service levels attained by these Internet tools make a compelling argument for adoption.





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