CAR / CDR reporting question. General monthly billing report.

[chrisnoon11]

Hello,

I have been asked to provide a monthly CSV report for long-distance call usage, with each row to include at least:

• A user's name
• UserID or extension
• Department
• Duration of LD calls for time period (month)

Unless I am missing something, CAR is not flexible enough to get anything close to this.  Furthermore, the End-User "Department" field appears to be completely unavailable to CAR, with a "Department Bill" being based on the "Manager ID" rather than "Department".  I had hoped that I could at least run a report at the Trunk level (outbound calls are via SIP trunk), but that only provides a %utilization report, with no detail or call durations.  Hopefully I am just missing something obvious, because this doesn't seem to be an unreasonable request.

CUCM 10.5.2

All end users have a cost center code in the "Department" field.

Any ideas? or am I stuck with finding a 3rd party billing server to accomplish this?

--Chris

[Chris Deren]

You are correct CAR has not changed since CUCM 3.X days and is only useful for searching individual records. Your best bet is to purchase 3rd party call accounting application, there are many vendors, the most common ones I've dealt with are ISI-Infortel and Veramak.

[chrisnoon11]

Thanks Chris,

I figured as much, but it's difficult to tell mgmt that the system can't report on usage in any useful way.  Looking at Verasmart as an alternative.  Thanks for your reply.

[Chris Deren]

Indeed, this is where Cisco relies on third party products, and I doubt it will ever change.

Let us know what you come up with.

HTH, please rate all useful posts!

Chris