Department call costs, budgets, inbound service level and billing — read straight from the CDR your PBX already writes. No dialplan changes, no CDR backend to configure, no AMI, nothing installed on the PBX.
Q5000 doesn’t need to know which distribution you run. It reads your actual CDR column layout from the database and falls back across the known extension-directory schemas until one returns rows — which is why the same connection works across these.
CDR in asteriskcdrdb, extensions from the standard directory tables.
Same CDR layout as FreePBX; credentials read from the distro config.
FreePBX-shaped CDR and extension tables; credentials read from /etc/elastix.conf.
CDR database located automatically; extensions from the VitalPBX directory.
Any Asterisk box writing CDR to MySQL or MariaDB, including PJSIP realtime.
Not Asterisk-based? Q5000 reads the Asterisk CDR schema directly, so it won’t connect to a 3CX, Yeastar, Grandstream, NEC or Panasonic system. We’d rather say so here than sell you a licence that can’t connect.
Host, port, username and password. Q5000 shows the server’s host-key fingerprint for you to confirm, and tunnels everything through that session — MySQL is never exposed to the network.
One button reads the database credentials your PBX distribution already stores, creates a least-privilege read-only account for Q5000, and verifies it. You never type a MySQL root password.
Q5000 asks your database which columns your cdr table actually has and builds its query from that, then offers to import your extension list so reports show names instead of numbers.
Per-department call costs from your own rate card, chargeback reports, and budget thresholds that alert managers at 80/90/100% of spend — while they can still act — with sub-department spend rolling up to parent budgets.
Per-department cost reporting →Service level measured per call chain from arrival to human answer — not per CDR leg, which reports a permanent 100%. Plus recovery rate, average hold time, abandonment excluding misdials, median and 90th-percentile wait, and a wait-time breakdown separating misdials from genuine lost business.
Inbound reporting and SLA →Q5000 works out whether your site identifies callers by extension, by PIN, or both, then attributes each call chain once — so shared phones and hot-desking still land in the right department.
Mapping PINs to departments →Turn a billing run into tax invoices with profit margin reporting, and email PDF or Excel report packs on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule without configuring an SMTP server.
Scheduled email reports →The full connection walkthrough: SSH credentials, a least-privilege read-only CDR user, extension import and PIN detection — without touching your dialplan.
Four mistakes that produce confidently wrong inbound metrics on Asterisk — per-leg service level, vanishing ring group calls, counting rows, and conflating missed with abandoned.
Turn raw CDR data into a per-department phone bill: account-code attribution, prefix-based rate rules, and the timezone/billsec gotchas that make totals miss.
The model and workflow that keeps PIN / account-code attribution accurate past a few hundred codes: three levels, idempotent CSV, an unassigned bucket, and PIN privacy.
Safe read-only CDR access across FreePBX, Issabel, Elastix and VitalPBX: least-privilege users, the VitalPBX unix_socket workaround, SSH tunnelling, and budget threshold alerts.
What actually changes when you leave a buffer-based call logger: the SSH data path, the mapping export that matters more than call history, and the parallel-run month that de-risks cutover.
Reports nobody has to remember to run: choosing a cadence that matches decisions, emailing attachments instead of portal links, and the catch-up behaviour that keeps schedules honest.
Call accounting reads the call detail records your Asterisk PBX already writes and turns them into cost, usage and performance reporting — per-department phone bills, chargeback, budget control and inbound service level. It is a reporting layer over your existing CDR, not a change to how calls are routed or billed.
FreePBX, Issabel, Elastix, VitalPBX and plain Asterisk installations that write CDR to MySQL or MariaDB. Q5000 does not need to identify your distribution — it reads your actual CDR column layout from the database and falls back across the known extension-directory schemas until one returns rows.
No changes to your dialplan, no CDR backend configuration, no AMI, no extra ports and nothing installed on the PBX. Q5000 needs SSH access with password authentication and reads the CDR table you already have. Optionally, it can create one least-privilege read-only MySQL user for itself.
No. Q5000 is purpose-built for Asterisk-family systems and reads the Asterisk CDR schema directly. If you run a non-Asterisk PBX, Q5000 is not the right fit — we would rather tell you that up front than sell you a licence that will not connect.
Yes. Multiple PBX servers can be connected, each with its own SSH tunnel and credentials, and records stay scoped per server — so identical extension numbers on two different sites do not collide.
You can export your CDR and upload the file instead. There is no format to select: Q5000 detects the delimiter and maps your column headers onto the fields it needs, which covers Asterisk and FreePBX exports as well as xDR and VoIPmonitor.
If your Asterisk PBX is writing CDR and you can reach it over SSH, you are about ten minutes from your first department cost report.