Are Faxes Not Considered Calls?

[DrainBamaged]

Good Day,

v16.0.9 Enterprise on Windows.

I just tried to run a report on all of our inbound fax lines from Jan 1st to today. The report came up blank. Tried all of 2020, same result. Each of the lines is set up to use the "Send fax to" inbound rule and I know we have received many dozens of faxes this year. I also did a detailed call report for just one fax ext and see nothing.

If I do a report on our fax out line I see 300+ calls.

So does this mean 3CX does not count inbound faxes as calls? If so, how do I track them? It's for a management report and quite important to sort out for a project. Not to mention there could be legal implications if we ever have to prove we received a specific fax or not.

 

[VasilisV_3CX]

Hi @DrainBamaged,

I've found that the incoming calls to the fax extension does show in the Call Report when I selected "To" as "Any". Can you verify?

EDIT: By selecting the To field as "Number" and choosing the fax extension number, you can produce an accurate report.

 

[DrainBamaged]

Hi VasilisV_3CX,

If I run the report with the fax Ext in the TO field, I see only the faxes internal staff sent to that ext. A total of two fax from Jan 1 2021 to today.

I do get fax email notifications on the 3CX mail account. There's 4500+ emails in there. Some fax, mostly not.

The Extension Statistic Report (what I screenshotted in the OP) is blank.

Calls do appear in call history. Reports with specific Ext are blank.



If I run the report wide open I see faxes (only one screenshotted):



If I specify Ext 888 on the same report, it is blank



If I try to run a report for all calls in the year dumped to CSV so I can find the fax numbers, I get this.




Limit to Jan only.



Limit to one week. Success. So now I have to run 52 reports for my annual report. But wait... There's more. Let's go deeper into the rabbit hole.

For each of the 52 csv reports I need to remove all other non-fax calls manually. Here's the results for single day. We have a dozen fax numbers spread across the org. It does not tell me what fax numbers they were sent to. So now I need to go into the 3CX emails, find the delivery report for the time and date, get the ext number and add that to the data to identify what line it came in on.


A day's data took me fifteen minutes. 251 work days in a year so it would take me 62+ hours to do an annual report. Then I need to piece the 52 individual CSV together and go through the emails to ID which fax it involves.

As shown, that is a ridiculous amount of work. If I could run the Extension Statistics Report on the fax ext this would be sorted in seconds.

"I'm afraid that there is no report that'll show the fax information in one place." Please correct this in future versions. At this point, I need to spend unbudgeted money on a third party custom report to get this info. Very disappointing.

 

[VasilisV_3CX]

Hi @DrainBamaged,

I've just run another report using the "Number": 888 in the "To" field and it gave me back the following:

 

[DrainBamaged]

Maybe v18 works better ('Number matches to pattern" isn't an option for me), but as I pointed out it is blank for me on v16. Regardless, even if it did work, all it shows is Fax 888. I'd still have to go to each delivery email, get the time date of each, locate the ext number it came in on to determine which fax line was used.

I was asked to generate a report on which fax numbers are under utilized. We have a dozen faxes in our organization and each would need to be categorized. So yes it helps, but only gets me half way there.

 

[VasilisV_3CX]

Hi @DrainBamaged,

I understand that you'd still need to verify via mail, just wanted to mention the Number matches to pattern is: