[asterisk-biz] Open source Asterisk billing solution

[Nitzan Kon]

Second that. From what I've seen of other billing systems they range
from bad to truly horrible. A2billing is the only solution I've seen
which gets even close to something I can depend on (or rather easily
modify to my needs).

Unfortunately, having said that, A2billing is very complicated and to
fit my needs I will need to modify it heavily. For example its handling
of DID's is so complicated that I will probably bypass it completely
and write my own AGI to handle incoming calls. Same goes for voicemail
support (or rather lack thereof in current stable version of
A2Billing). Personally I believe that keeping the customer interface as
stupidified as possible is the best way to go. Your users are not going
to know what a DID or a CID group is - they just want a simple phone
number that works. Unfortunately none of the open source projects out
there is at a fit-for-the-masses level yet, at least not without doing
massive amount of work to customize it.

What I *did* like about A2Billing though is that it's written in PHP
and easily modifiable. It provides a good base to build and customize
on, and the rating engine seems to be doing its job reliably.

(As far as Freeside goes- I have NOT tested it. But it appears like
it's seriously lacking proper documentation, which is why I stayed away
from it personally. It could be a great platform though - don't know.)

  -- Nitzan

--- Jaswinder Singh <vicky.r at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have had good success with setting up and using A2billing . It's
> way
> better than other open source billing system ( only my opinion ) :) .