Installing Call Accounting Software

Before doing the install I recommend your bring a laptop along with a serial port and hyper terminal for trouble shooting. It could save you a lot of time if you have this handy. Also make sure the computer your installing call accounting on meets the minimum requirements and has hyper terminal installed on it.

I suggest before installing software in Windows that you shut down any program that is running first before you do the install. If you have trouble with the install you may need to press Control-Alt-Delete once to bring up the task list and then end task on everything, but explorer. You may may need to repeat this process until everything, but explorer has shut down.

Install the software and when the pricing wizard form pops up, fill in at minimum, the home area code before trying to continue.

Tip: Do not check the 9 for centrex if you do not have centrex lines. You only need this if a 9 shows up directly in front of the phone number in the raw data from the phone system. Example: P91414xxx-xxxx. If you see something like 9 1414xxx-xxxx do not check 9 for centrex.

Call Accounting defaults to one million call records. This is about a 52 mb file. It's full size right from the beginning and will never get larger or smaller unless you change it. For most companies one million call records is plenty. In 98% of all cases selecting the default of one million call records is the preferred option.

Select your phone system type and pick your communicatons port and baud rate.

Tip: If you change the baud rate in call accounting I find it works best to then shut the program itself down and restart for the baud rate change to take effect.

If you should decide you need to set the number of call records to something other than default, do not just automatically set it to max. The less resources you use the faster reports will run. Setting to max may result in there not being enough room to save reports or to save other data on the hard drive of the computer.

To determine the number of call records a company needs you need to know the total incomming calls and outgoing calls the phone system is processing in a day, or week, or even a month. You may even need to know the number of internal calls on a system that reports intenal call records. Next you need to know how long a time period the customer wants to keep call record information.

Say, the customer wants to keep about a years worth of data and they process about 2,000 incoming and outgoing calls a month. Take that 2000 and add a small buffer to the count for say busy days. Lets say they do about 2500 calls a month. Now take 2500 and multiply it by 12 for 12 months. Thats about 300,000 call records a year. Now lets add a little more to the count incase they have a good year or expand the company. So lets be generous, will use 400,000 call records for the size of the database, which should handle all there calls for one year.

Next, connect ther SMDR from your phone system to the computer and verify you are receiving call records in our Call Accounting software. If not, check the output from the phones system with your laptop. Use hyper terminal or any communications program to view the data on the serial port. By verifying your receiving call records on the laptop you just eliminated half the system as part of the problem. Next use hyper terminal on the call accounting computer to verify your getting call records into the computer.

Now if you have call records in hyper terminal you should almost always have call records showing up in call accounting. If you don't have call records make sure you have installed the hardware key on the printer port, LPT1. It goes between the cable for the printer and the computer. If you don't have a printer don't worry it's not needed.

If your still not getting call records and you have a version 6.x of call accounting you can select Help and then About on the menu and below where it reports the version number it should say "With Full Phone System Support", if not is will say "With Communicator Only Support". If it says with communicator only support it is not seeing the hardware key and you have a problem to fix before you will see consistant call records.

If you have an older call accounting you may see a flashing Error on the bottom status bar of call accounting or a demo mode indicator counting down from 60 minutes. If you see this the call accounting is not seeing the hardware key and you will need to get this fixed or the program will either shut down or not collect call records.

Now before you go to far, I want to remind you that the Sentinel Key is required for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000. Call Accounting has not been tested on Windows XP, but I believe you will need the driver for this operating system also..

If after you install the Sentinel Key Driver and your still not seeing the hardware key, try hooking up a printer and printing a test page. If you can print the printer port in definitly working and we can eliminate that. Take a look at the sentinel key. It has little plastic arrows on it that basically say this end toward the computer. Make sure it is plugged in correctly. Verify the top number that's stamped on the key. It should be RB-4fFSCCB-B or RB-4GHVCH-B. If it's some other number you probably have the wrong key. If you still can't get it to work give our technical support crew a call.

Next, set up your Circuit Groups in call accounting. Note: if you have a version number less then 6.x do not use circuit group zero (the Undefined trunk group). It's a special circuit group and in previous version was designed to show calls as UNKNOWN and will not cost call correctly for any lines in that group.

Tip: Do not change the default rate bands in the circuit groups. Ninety nine percent of the time they don't need to be changed.

Go to the main screen and verify that your calls are now being identified correctly. Try making a local call, a long distance call, and a toll free call. They don't need to be very long to verify that they are being identified correctly.

Go to the Template reports and run the top most report to verify you are saving call records and to make sure the reports are working correctly. Verify the dashes in phone numbers are in the right places and calls are labeled correctly. If it's a local call it should say LOCAL, if it's a long distance call it should say LONGDIST, etc.

Troubleshooting Tips for Call Accounting Software

Demo mode is flashing or status bar is counting down from 60 minutes.
Make sure you have the proper software key plugged into the printer port, (if required).
Verify you can print to the printer. If not, you may have a printer port problem.

Sometimes a printer that is not turned on and online may cause this problem. Try turning on the printer and restarting call accounting.

I get an "Index Mismatch 1 or 2" Error.
This means that there is a problem with the index files. To fix this you simply need to do a reindex.

In Windows call accounting go to Main screen and click on Maintenance, select Database and press the reindex button. In version 6.x call accounting program reindex can be found directly on the Maintenance menu.

If this doesn't fix the problem please call your dealer for further tech support.

All my calls are showing up as "Unknown"
Check to make sure you have no members in Trunk Group 0. If you do, move them to a defined trunk group or any trunk group from 1 on up.

All my long distance calls show up as local.
Most likely problem here is the pick code field in the Area Codes table is probably set wrong. The key here is to remember that we do not look at the whole outgoing phone number, but rather look at the number from left to right like the phone companies do.

Example: Here's two phone numbers, if you look at the leading digits which one is a local number and which one is a long distance number? 1414555XXXX or 555XXXX. It's easy. The one with the leading one is long distance. We also know that the next 3 digits are the area code and the next 3 digits after that is the office code or exchange.

To fix the pick code in the Area Code tables you need to know that area code table one is always an International table and you can easily identify it by its pick code of '011' or '9011' if you have centrex. Long distance tables are tables 1 to 30 and are searched in that order.

Area Code table 2 is usually set up as "Long Distance w/Pick Code" with a pick code of '10XXXXX1' or '910XXXXX1' if you have centrex.. The X's are like wild cards and stand for numbers 0 to 9. Note: the pick code field is simply looking at the leading digits of the phone number. Once we have a match here we can strip the pick code off and we know the next 3 digits will be the area code.

Area Code table 3 is usually set up as "Long Distance Dial One" with a pick code of '1' (or '91' if you have centrex). It's the same thing as above, but this table is for handling calls without a pick code.

Now let's put it all together. The Area Code tables are looking for two things to match before they will use a particular table. One is the circuit group and in most cases that is set to "All Circuit Groups" so you don't need to worry about that. Second is the pick code. So if the trunk group matches and the pick code matches, we'll use that particular table to route the area codes for costing.

Still confused? Call your dealer for tech support or training. If you're the dealer, call Ultimate! Software Products or e-mail us at training@uspnet.com and schedule a walk through of the program over the phone or just ask what you need to know and we'll do our best to help you.