@aleclerc already pointed you at the right pages, so this is just a footnote to that. We happened to have a test account handy and tried your questions on it, in case seeing actual figures is useful.
Everything below is that test account’s data, and it’s a very quiet account, so please read the numbers as illustrative rather than as anything about yours.
1. Why the call and text charges aren’t in Transaction History
From what we can tell they’re simply kept in a different place. Transaction History seems to record account-level events – DID monthly fees, DID activation fees, fax number monthly fees, payments and deposits – while per-minute call cost and per-message cost come off the balance directly and appear only in the Call Detail Record and the MSG Detail Records.
The part that caught us out: if you try to reconcile your balance from Transaction History alone, you’ll be short by your usage total for the period. On our test account that was about 2 cents, so it hardly matters there, but it would scale with call volume.
2. Pulling the per-call costs
Asking for a breakdown gave us the metered charges grouped by number. On that account: 9 billed inbound calls totaling $0.0198, all at $0.009/min in 6-second increments, across two of its three DIDs.
3. Whether incoming and outgoing rates match
This is the one where we’d be most cautious, because our test account came out asymmetric and we don’t know how typical that is:
- Inbound to a per-minute DID: $0.0090/min
- Outbound to Toronto (416/647): $0.0052/min on Value, $0.0072/min on Premium
Both bill in 6-second increments. So on that account inbound actually cost more per minute than outbound to the same area code, which surprised us. But the inbound side depends on whether the DID is billed per-minute or flat-rate, and the outbound side depends on which route the sub-account uses, so yours could easily come out differently. Worth checking your own numbers rather than trusting ours.
For texts we couldn’t come up with a figure at all. We couldn’t find a per-message cost or rate anywhere in the API responses, for SMS or MMS, even though call records and fax records do carry rate and total. So the portal’s MSG Detail Records / Rates pages may be the only place to get message pricing. Happy to be corrected if someone knows a way we missed.
4. The ~1 minute inbound SMS delay
We don’t have anything useful for you here, unfortunately. As far as we can see that’s upstream carrier and aggregator handoff, and there’s nothing in the API that exposes per-hop delivery timing or lets you influence it, so it isn’t something you can query your way out of. It may be worth its own thread with support and some real timestamps – for authorization codes a minute is genuinely painful, and that’s a fair thing to push on.
The screenshots are us asking an AI assistant these questions against that test account, through an (unofficial) MCP server we maintain for VoIP.ms: you ask in plain language and it pulls the call records, transaction history and rate tables. It’s at https://voipms-mcp.ecliptical.io if you’re curious. Mentioning it only because it’s how we produced the screenshots – the answers above hold regardless.
You also can use “Generate Invoice” to have a more grouped view.
