Is your cloud PBX business actually profitable?
25 questions. Ten minutes. A score, and clear understanding of what to fix first.
- The questions come from what operators tell us breaks
Growing revenue is not the same as making money
Most cloud PBX advice tells you the market is growing. It does not tell you where your money goes.
In our weekly conversations with telecom operators, the same five issues keep coming up
- integrations nobody ever completed
- billing that counts fraud traffic as real calls
- seats on desks nobody sits at
- a stack that only one person understands, and
- features customers would lose in a move.
This checklist turns those five issues into 25 questions you can answer from memory. No data gathering, no spreadsheet, no workshop.
Score your cloud PBX service in five parts
One point for every Yes. Answer fast, your first answer is usually the right one. If you have to go and check before you can answer, then the answer is a No.
1. What you sell
- Can you name the industry or segment where you win most of your deals?
- When a customer says 3CX is cheaper, do you have an answer that doesn’t involve a discount?
- Do you know your revenue per seat, line, or extension, broken down by customer type?
- Can you build a new package for a new type of business in a week, without waiting on a developer?
- Do you sell a contact centre option – call queues, recording, a softphone in the browser – on top of the PBX?
2. How you run it
- Can your business customers add a user, change call routing, or reset an extension themselves without calling your helpdesk?
- Is every customer on one shared platform, rather than a virtual machine of their own?
- When a new customer signs up, does the service activate without anyone entering the same details twice?
- Do your PBX, billing, and CRM share one customer record, or does somebody reconcile them?
- Could a new engineer take over your stack tomorrow without the person who built it?
3. What you bill
- Does your charging mechanism react during the call, so a fraud spike stops the call instead of showing up on next month’s invoice?
- Can you see margin per customer for this month without having to export data to a spreadsheet?
- Can you charge per feature, or are your customers stuck in fixed bundles?
- Are you billing for seats nobody uses – the phone in the lobby, the desk that was vacated in March?
- Have you checked what you’ve paid for unused wholesale minutes in the last 90 days?
4. What your platform can handle
- Does your charging mechanism react during the call, so a fraud spike stops the call instead of showing up on next month’s invoice?
- Can you see margin per customer for this month without having to export data to a spreadsheet?
- Can you charge per feature, or are your customers stuck in fixed bundles?
- Are you billing for seats nobody uses – the phone in the lobby, the desk that was vacated in March?
- Have you checked what you’ve paid for unused wholesale minutes in the last 90 days?
5. How you sell it
- Does your charging mechanism react during the call, so a fraud spike stops the call instead of showing up on next month’s invoice?
- Can you see margin per customer for this month without having to export data to a spreadsheet?
- Can you charge per feature, or are your customers stuck in fixed bundles?
- Are you billing for seats nobody uses – the phone in the lobby, the desk that was vacated in March?
- Have you checked what you’ve paid for unused wholesale minutes in the last 90 days?
What you get at the end
A score out of 25 and an overall rating:
Scaling, Leaking, or Firefighting.
More useful than the total is your lowest-scored section. That is the one holding the others back, and it tells you what to do on Monday.
- A low score on billing points at real-time charging.
- A low score on operations points at self-service and provisioning.
The guide spells out all five.
- Start the checklist
Want it as a PDF?
The 12-page self-assessment guide takes the same 25 questions and adds a short explanation of what each answer tells you and what it looks like when it's working.
It includes the parity checklist for replacing your current platform.
- Send me the guide
Send us your score
Tell us your total and lowest-scoring section, and we will tell you what we would fix first and what it would take. No deck, no discovery call before you know whether we are useful.
Two things worth reading next
The first is six questions to ask any vendor before you get to pricing. The second is what we actually build.
Replacing BroadWorks, NetSapiens, Metaswitch, or an Asterisk build?
Most migration advice is about cutover: parallel running, weekend windows, rollback plans. What holds up the move is rarely the cutover itself, but having to tell your customers that a feature they use every day is no longer available.
Ask any vendor these six, in this order, and get the answers before you get to pricing.
- Which features do my customers use today that the new platform does not have? Ask for the gap list before the demo, not after the contract.
- What happens to my CDR history, my numbers, and my billing records? Where they go, who moves them, and what you can still query afterwards.
- Which of my current integrations already exist on the new platform? By name, with a live project behind each one. “We have an API” is not an answer.
- What does my cost per line or per seat look like after the move, not during it? The transition price and the running price are different numbers. Ask for both.
- What can I put my hands on before I commit, and what does that cost? A trial, a sandbox, or a scoped proof of concept with a price on it.
- Who does the work, and what counts as a change request? Your team, their team, or a partner you haven’t met. Get it in writing.
If a vendor cannot answer 1 and 3 in the first meeting, the rest doesn’t matter.
Where PortaOne fits
Most of this checklist focuses on billing, charging, and provisioning. That is what PortaOne builds: the commercial side of a telecom business, in one platform where the parts are already connected to each other. We do not sell phone service. We sell the system underneath it to the people who do.
- One platform, already connected
PortaOne ships billing, real-time charging, a Class 4 and Class 5 softswitch, and an SBC together, all talking to each other out of the box. You are not integrating four vendors and owning the seams between them. - An unlimited perpetual licence
PortaOne sells an unlimited perpetual licence. Buy it once and run it. No per-seat ceiling, no clause that turns your biggest deal into your biggest cost. - Everything included from day one
All functionality is in the PortaOne licence. You will not discover six months in that the self-care portal or the contact centre module is a separate purchase. - Source code, database, and API access
PortaOne gives you source code, database, and API access. Build on it, query it directly, connect it to what you already run. Several of our customers have built their own front end on top. - Fast when it needs to be
PortaOne helped a greenfield operator launch a live 5G service in 83 days. Not every project needs to move that quickly, but the platform shouldn’t hold up the launch date. - 5,000 pages of public documentation
PortaOne publishes around 5,000 pages of product documentation, free and open, no sign-up form. Several of our customers pointed an AI assistant at it and asked it hard questions before they got in touch.
