Asterisk users asking for “billing” usually want one of two completely different things. Picking the wrong category means either a telecoms platform you didn’t need, or a reporting tool that can’t take payments.
The dividing line is simple: are you billing other people for calls, or working out what your own calls cost you?
In the open-source Asterisk world this is where ASTPP and A2Billing live. Both are Class 4 and Class 5 softswitches with real-time billing engines, built for VoIP providers, carriers, resellers and calling-card operators. They integrate at the dialplan level because they have to be in the call path to authorise and rate calls as they happen.
This is what Q5000 does. It never touches the call path — it connects over SSH, reads the CDR your PBX already writes, and turns it into department costs, budgets, usage audits and inbound performance reporting.
The people who need call cost reports are rarely the people who run the phone system. Finance wants month-end department costs. HR wants a defensible record of personal versus business usage. Department managers want a warning at 80% of budget, not an explanation at 110%. None of them should need SSH access or an engineer’s time to get a report.
There is also a risk argument, and it is the honest one. A softswitch is production telephony: a bad configuration change can stop calls. A read-only reporting tool reading CDR after the fact cannot affect a single call, whatever anyone clicks. When the goal is visibility rather than revenue, that asymmetry matters more than any feature comparison.
The trade-off is real in the other direction too. If you genuinely need to charge a customer, hold a prepaid balance or cut a call off at zero funds, no amount of reporting will do it — you need something in the call path, and a softswitch is the right answer.
A softswitch sits in the call path: it authorises, routes and terminates calls, and rates them in real time so it can enforce prepaid balances and credit limits. Call accounting sits after the call, reading the call detail records your PBX already wrote, and turns them into cost, budget and performance reporting. One is telephony infrastructure for selling calls; the other is a reporting layer for controlling what you spend on them.
Both are Class 4 and Class 5 softswitches with real-time billing engines, built for VoIP service providers, carriers, resellers and calling-card operators who bill external customers. They can be made to produce internal cost reports, but you are deploying and maintaining a telecoms billing platform in your call path to get them — which is a large amount of infrastructure for a department chargeback report.
Yes. They do different jobs and do not conflict. If you are a service provider billing customers through a softswitch, you may still want internal call accounting for your own staff and departments — those are separate questions with separate answers.
Because the people who need the reports are not the people who run the phone system. Finance, HR and department managers need month-end costs, budget alerts and usage audits without server access or engineering time, and a read-only reporting tool cannot affect call routing if someone mis-clicks. A softswitch places the same reporting behind production telephony infrastructure.
Not for Q5000. It connects over SSH and reads the CDR table your PBX already writes — no dialplan changes, no CDR backend configuration, no AMI and nothing installed on the PBX. Softswitch platforms integrate at the dialplan level by design, because they have to be in the call path to do their job.
That’s the job Q5000 was built for — on FreePBX, Issabel, Elastix, VitalPBX and plain Asterisk.