Can a Cheap but Ambitious Call Accounting Package Make It in the Big City?

CTI’s (Norristown, PA - 610-666-1700) Nereus (formerly Unity) call accounting package has many features to help make a telecom manager’s work life easier. With more than 30 ready-to-eat standard reports, managers can click their way to piping-hot call detail printouts filtered by date and threshold value. To handle meals on the run, a simple query interface lets you quickly fish out the right datum. The fraud detection filter is also fairly painless to prepare, alerting techs via an Internet browser pop-up. It’s all very nutritious, but I disliked Nereus’ unfriendly configuration windows and its primitive and messy report creation facilities. After looking at Teleconnect’s call accounting omnibus, which we printed in October 1999, Nereus’ price tag (less than $400 for 150 extensions) does come in far lower than most of the ones we listed. If you’re a budget-constrained service firm, this may be the right call accounting package for you.

CONFIGURATION IS A ONE-TIME AFFAIR

After arm wrestling with Nereus’ overly secure registration window, I was eager to see if I could tease this call accounting package into parsing the raw data generated from our Panasonic KX-TA624. Fortunately, Elaine had previously tested our Omnitronix DataLink (see January ’00 Testdrive) and wisely kept the call data from the KX-TA624. Since Nereus lets you import data from a file, I grabbed the DataLink’s call data with HyperTerminal and dumped it on my PC, rather than letting Nereus pull it down directly. (By the way, it supports several lines of buffer boxes. But this may involve some ASCII decoding, as I found out later). I had to describe the Panasonic’s CDR format using the Nereus’ format configuration screen, which displays an intimidating list of text boxes describing the position and length of individual fields (i.e., calling extension, dialed number, trunk number, and duration) within the CDR stream. If your phone system is listed in the Choose Phone System drop list of 50 popular phones, Nereus will populate the fields for you. I wasn’t so fortunate.

I was forced into reviewing the Panasonic manual to determine how to decode CDR formats for incoming and outgoing calls. Eventually, I brought up the raw data in Nereus’ viewer (which has a ruler bar, ticked every 10 characters), and proceeded to count character positions and lengths. Then I entered the result into the format screen. I reran the data through Nereus’ parsing engine. No dice. I was still receiving vague Invalid Data error messages, which implied that my format map was incorrect. After I returned to the format screen and made a few more changes, it became apparent that this part of the app had a maddening defect: it didn’t check for overlapping field definitions, a flaw that practically ensures that typing errors will initially go undetected. I was also not pleased that I couldn’t just copy the format of incoming call to the outgoing format dialog box. In most cases, they are almost identical. On the plus side, though, I was delighted that Nereus offered a powerful “regular expression” pattern matcher, which made it very easy to program Nereus to distinguish between incoming and outgoing calls.

In the end, I gave the CDR data to the folks at CTI and they came up with the right CDR format numbers. Theirs worked and Nereus correctly interpreted the data, which it placed in a temporary database. Nereus’ configuration is tedious when your phone system is not one of the Chosen Ones, but as with all call accounting software, once you get that done, you’ll never have to return to it (unless you buy a new phone system).

FLAT ORGANIZATIONS AND REPORTS

To get meaningful reports, more configuration was still ahead of me. I needed to define for Nereus a corporate database, plus dialing pattern and pricing information rules. I tackled my corporate organization map first. Nereus lets you define up to six levels of corporate hierarchy, but I decided that my business was the modern kind, with a very flat organizational model, so I just defined a single department level. I then hopped into the corporate database section of Nereus and set up a few departments, giving them names and department numbers and assigning the Panasonic’s extension numbers to each of my departments.

Next on my to-do list was examining and possibly changing Nereus’ dialing pattern table, which tells the app whether the dialed digits indicate a local, long distance, international, or free call (or any one of the other half-dozen or so calling types), and which ultimately determines how the call is priced. Patterns are formed from a combination of actual digits and wild card characters, representing numbers from “1” to “9.” In addition to calling type, each row of table also has a field for Minimum Recording Time, which is the number of seconds Nereus waits before deciding the call has connected (and therefore is legitimate). I had noticed earlier that many of the call records on the Omnitronix had been flagged by the Nereus parser with the error message Call Too Short. I checked the manual and traced the problem to this field, on this screen. I played it safe and removed the existing interstate long distance call pattern, added my own, and set the Minimum Recording Time field to an all-encompassing one-second value.

As with other call accounting software, Nereus comes with pricing tables gathered from more than a few different carriers (more than 200 in the advanced version), covering every possible non-local calling possibility: intra-LATA intrastate, intra-LATA interstate, inter-LATA intrastate, and inter-LATA interstate. You’re free to change existing pricing tables or create your own. Then, in the CDR Rule window, you tell Nereus which carriers you’re working with, assigning a carrier to each calling option and then defining it all as a Calling Rule. It’s all explained in the gray advanced feature manual that comes with the software. I ended up staying with the General Rate window with its less complicated rate structure: just initial, overtime, and evening discount rate fields. However, had I decided on a pricing rule, I would have assigned the rule to a trunk group, which is created in a separate window.

Everything was finally in place, so I brought up Nereus’ Call Monitoring app, clicked on the arrow in the top lefthand corner, and waited while Nereus completed its task of pricing records stored in the temporary database. After kicking out a few invalid records, I finally had coaxed Nereus into digesting the raw data.

PRACTICING LAW WITHOUT A LICENSE

I brought up a few reports with the online viewer to confirm that everything worked. After warming up with this trial, I wanted to see Nereus capturing data directly from our little Panasonic testbed: the KX-TA624 KSU and Teltone TLS line simulator. I connected a serial cable between the KX-TA624’s SMDR port and the PC. I used HyperTerminal on my PC to check that call records were being spit out of the Panasonic, then configured Nereus with the same RS-232 parameters I had set for HyperT. I brought up Nereus’ separate Call Monitoring app, made a long distance call with the KX-TA624, and waited . . . and waited. I later learned that Nereus was, in fact, reading my data. Pathologically, the Panasonic was sending records with a “carriage return” delimiter; Nereus was expecting a line feed, except there were no error messages. I had forgotten what the decimal equivalent of the ASCII representation of a carriage return is (by the way, it’s 13), so I left Nereus’ End of Record field to the default line feed value, 10. It was easier for me to reprogram the Panasonic to send the darn line feed than to wrestle with Nereus. I decided to configure the Panasonic to force client code entry, the way the law firms do, to get the call accounting system to reel off a client bill-back report. I added client codes into the Nereus database, and the firm of Rowland Yuan Jones Boccadoro Kramer & Green was in business. Nereus produced a clean client charge-back report, and the results of my efforts are on the previous page. Nereus also lets you add a surcharge to the client’s phone charges, but we here at Rowland believe in long-term client relationships and avoid that ugly practice (read: we charge enough by the hour).