Initial Setup of Your pbxHQ Hosted PBX Account

There will be a lot of information in this guide, feel free to skip to areas most relevant to you:

1. Important information to understand about your account
2. First steps all users should consider taking
3. Other resources

1. Important information about your account

How billing works

Your credit card will only be charged if you create a billable item, and then confirm that you accept the charges involved.  Every billable item within our system, will always prompt you for confirmation before it is added to your system.  You do not need to worry about getting charged for anything unless you have acknowledged the charge during creation of said item.  Here are two examples:

Bad: When attempting to add 100 outbound trunks, you will see a message like this

Good: Adding phone numbers to your account (for promotion users with first 5 numbers free):

While still discussing billing, auto credit top-up or auto balance notifications should be enabled to make sure your account can always make and receive calls.

Add funds manually to your account:

 Setup Low Balance Notifications:

Create Auto Top-Ups:

Account Details you Can and Likely Should Change:

Your account name and account realm are both changeable.  For ease of logging in, and ease of configuring your VoIP devices, it is nice to change both of these to simpler forms of their what was set automatically for you.

Account name:

Personally, I prefer simple one word account names.  There is nothing wrong with having a longer account name, but if you will allow your other phone system users access, it will be easier for them with a more basic account name:

Account realm:

This is the SIP Domain / SIP Realm that you will use when configuring SIP devices.  For my own account, I use 1pbx.sip.pbxhq.com. 

Account Timezone:

You should set this to the timezone most of your system users will be in.  It can also be set on a per-user basis, but that is unneccesary if they are in the same timezone that is set account-wide.

2. First steps all users should consider taking

Setup the user that was auto-created properly:

Create your extension number:

Create your Voicemail:

Add a Main Number to your account

You can purchase your first number right from within the Main Number section of your account.  Or if you have already purchased a number, you can select "Add from spare numbers".

This will automatically setup your account-wide call display settings.  As with almost all settings, it can be overridden on a per-user basis.

Setup call handling of your main number:

Setup your second user

This screen can be located by going to the "Users" menu and simply selecting "Add User"

Add devices for your Users:

SIP Softphone Device

Cell phone

Add more Apps to your account!

Even though most PBX functionality can be found within SmartPBX, we have a TON of other apps available for you, all free of charge!  We hope you will explore the possibilities by enabling some:

Apps Menu

Blue App Exchange Button

Apps Menu with a Few Additional Apps Installed:

3. Other resources

• For detailed information on configuring your SIP devices, please refer to: SIP Phone Registration
• For advanced configuration of secure SIP TLS / SRTP or ZRTP: Secure Calls: TLS SRTP
• We have phone configuration guides for a few phones, and will be adding more soon: Yealink SIP Guide | Grandstream SIP Guide | Cisco SIP Guide
• Any further questions on your account, please ask on our community forum. We answer questions very quickly there! pbxHQ Community