AstBill Credit Control

AstBill is a FREE real time billing engine for Asterisk. Using AstBill to process your Asterisk calls you get real time credit control of your customers.

When any SIP or IAX client places a call, AstBill will do a credit look up. If the clients account has sufficient funds to place a call then AstBill will calculate the amount needed for the duration of the call. By default, calls disconnect after max 60 minutes. [You can change this.) AstBill will create a record in the MySQL table 'astcreditres' with the uniqueid, user and MAX COST of the call. Next time somebody is using the same account to call, AstBill will check that there are funds available for that customer then deduct any entry reserved for that customer in the MySQL table 'astcreditres' before AstBill decides the maximum length of the call the client is allowed to make.

The CDR in AstBill has two parts. When a call is initiated the CDR info available is stored in the table 'astcdr'.
When the call is terminated the rest of the information about the call is updated in the CDR.
The cost of the call is calculated and deducted from the customers balance and the record for reserved funds in 'astcreditres' is then deleted.
The advantage to this is that it allows us to query the database to find out how many calls are currently being processed --at any time-- without having to use the Asterisk Manager Interface!