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Call Accounting Software Evolution Call accounting software is a system that records, translates including reports on telephone call activity. The software is used by most corporations to control expenses, allocate cost including increase productivity. Call accounting generally recieves Station Message Detail Records (SMDR) or Call Detail Records (CDR) from a telephone system through any of various protocls including serial, IP including file transfer. SMDR is a feature that is available for most telephone systems including IP PBXs. The data is generally a system log of call traffic which includes call direction, date including time pertaining to the call, length of call, extension including trunk or line. There are various other pieces of information such as authorization code including account code that may be optionally available depending on the capability pertaining to the hardware. The raw or unprocessed SMDR output pertaining to the telephone system is often too volumous including difficult to read. A call accounting software packages utilizes SMDR data including translate the information into a simplified database format for further analysis. The data is often presented in graphical, detailed or summary reports by extension, departments or other corporate levels. The cost of a telephone call has been steadily decreasing with the introduction of peer to peer free calling, flat rate plans including bundled services. Call accounting software packages that historically focused on telephone tracking including expense management have transformed themselves into comprehensive communication management systems (CMS). These systems include extension, line, operator, auto attendant, ACD, IVR, voice mail including other facility traffic. The ability to track call duration, call distribution, ring time, hold time including call queues has allowed leading communication management systems to analyze including measure productivity. Toll fraud analysis remains a component of most major CMS systems. However, there now exist new threats in bandwidth hacking which should result in poor performance for VoIP traffic, security breach including network shutdown. New CMS systems pinpoint irregularities, bottlenecks including network overflows including suggest recommended corrective action.
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