Description and Architecture

Budget Control is included into Imagicle Call Analytics Enterprise license. Imagicle Budget Control allows you to assign a budget to the calls made by users or group of users in a given time range (day, week, month) and receive notifications in case the budget goes beyond the desired limit.

You may also lock the telephone and prevent it from making further calls (Cisco UCM only)

Thanks to Budget Control you can accurately foresee your telco expenses and prevent abuses.

With Imagicle Call Analytics Enterprise you can accurately monitor your telco expenses; but to prevent a problem is better than solve it later. With Budget Control you can now decide in advance how much to spend.

Main Features

• Upon reaching the budget limit, a notification email is sent to the user, to a manager or to the administrator
• Budget can be easily managed through the web interface
• The budget is renewed automatically at the end of the period. Residual budget can be cumulated to the next period
• If Phone Lock is licensed, the phone can also be automatically locked (Cisco UCM only)
• Tracks and records the budget usage and overcoming. Reports can be exported in Excel and CSV format by the web interface
• Analyse the spending trends by time period and by users group. Create reports on the fly to verify savings. Save personal reports for later usage

The Budget Control module requires a valid Imagicle Call Analytics license. I.e. Imagicle Call Analytics must be correctly licensed and activated on the same machine.

You cannot use or test Budget Control if Imagicle Call Analytics Enterprise is not working correctly. The phone locking feature is optional and available only for Cisco UCM platforms. If Phone Lock is not licensed on the machine, Budget Control simply won't lock the users' phones.

Note: Starting from Imagicle 2020.Spring.1 release, Phone Lock TAPI engine can selectively lock overlapping extensions upon budget reach, if associated to different partitions and different phone devices. To enable this feature please populate relevant "Partition" field in Imagicle Users' list.

Product Architecture

Imagicle Call Analytics Enterprise gathers call data from the PBX and calculates the costs.

Budget Control includes a service which connects to Imagicle Call Analytics Enterprise every ten seconds through Imagicle Call Analytics SOAP api. Every ten seconds, it queries the database for calls belonging to the users to be monitored and sums the costs. For new budgets assignments, it collects and sums all the costs for the selected time range (month or week). Then it collects only the new calls.

When a percentage of the maximum budget is reached, one of the programmed event is fired: notification through email or phone locking.

Phone locking is performed by Phone Lock. Phone Lock monitors the phone activities through TAPI or by using CURRI-ECC method. A TSP must be installed on the machine as described in the General configuration section.

Note: If you are leveraging FAC (Forced Authorization Codes) or CMC (Client Matter Codes) to initiate an outbound call, please do not enable Phone Lock feature. Phone Lock operates at phone device or line level, so other phone devices/lines can still initiate outbound calls using FAC/CMC code of a blocked user.

Budget overcoming events are stored in a table of the main UC Suite database which can be queries through the web interface.

Specific Budget Control reports are available through the web interface.