Bills for hotel guests - easy way?

[PreviouslyAsterisk]

A prospective customer has an old BT Inspiration system.

When a new guest arrives, he dials a code to activate the phone in that room, and when a guest leaves, he dials another code to check the guest out. Doing this causes the printer attached to the PBX to produce a bill.

With 3CX, there are complex hotel integrations - but in this case, the hotel is too small for this, and doesn't have a such a system.

What I need, is a way for the hotel receptionist to print a phone bill for a particular guest.

The daily reports aren't good enough, as they show multiple extensions and are automatically generated each day - we would want to generate the phone bill at the end of the guest's stay, which may be a day, or may be a week.

Any suggestions?

 

[VoIPTools]

If the intent is to push a button to enable or disable an extension, you could create a CFD application that prompts for the room number (extension). The CFD could then perform the necessary action on the extension. However, perhaps a web portal would be a better solution because you could simply click on the desired extension and you would be able to visually see the state of the extension (enabled or disabled). Further, you could have a button that prints the report too.

 

[PreviouslyAsterisk]

Cheers - yeah such an application could be knocked up to do that.

However - my issue is more about billing, and creating a bill for the duration of the guest's stay. The daily reports aren't good enough, as the guest may well be making billable calls after the report is generated. Plus, I don't want ten days of reports for a ten day stay.

Short of a custom application, I can't see any easy way around this?

 

[VoIPTools]

I don't know of an option using the built-in reports. But the data exists, and we can get it in a supported way too. You can configure 3CX to automatically create a CDR text file every time a guest finishes a call (3CX Management Console --> Settings --> CDR). This file will give you everything you need to create the custom report. It includes the extension, name, number dialed, start, end, duration and I believe it even calculates a cost. You can parse these files into a database, then create your own custom report that is formatted exactly the way you want. That's what I was proposing when describing the web portal report button.

We already have a tool that can automatically parse the CDR files and place the information into a SQL or MySQL database. I encourage you to take a look at our 3CX Exporter add-on.