Why Your Company Needs Call Accounting ?

Control Telephone Abuse
Some percentage of your employees use the company telephones for personal long distance calls to friends and family. Knowing who is calling where and how much they're spending can be useful. Often employees appreciate being told they are spending big money...and they stop.

Control Telephone Misuse
The rates for calling can vary widely depending on your carrier rate, the route the call takes, who makes the dialing decision...a call accounting system is a good check to see if you are spending money needlessly.

Allocate telephone calling costs among departments and divisions
Telephones - voice, data, video and imaging - are some of your biggest expenses. They're a cost that should be allocated to the products you are making, or the departments and divisions in your company. Telephone costs can determine which product is profitable. Which isn't. A software company recently dropped one of its three "big" software packages because phone calls for support got too expensive.

Bill Clients and Projects back for telephone charges incurred on their behalf.
Every lawyer, government contractor, etc. does it. It makes sense.

Shared tenant and resale of long distance and local phone calls.
As in a hotel/motel, hospital, shared condominium, etc. Someone's got to send out the bills. And it's not the phone company. In fact, with a call accounting system, you can be your own phone company.

Motivate sales people.
The more phone calls they make, the more they sell. Keep track of their call volume and manage them accordingly.

Network Optimization.
Two fancy words for figuring which is the best combination of MCI, Sprint, Verizon, etc. And which is the best combination of all the various services each offer. A rule of thumb: there is a 20 fold difference in per minute telephone calling costs between any two major cities in the US. And you won't hear any difference in quality despite the huge difference in price. It's amazing.

Phone System Diagnostics.
Is the phone system working as well as it should be? Are all the lines working? Are all the circuit cards working? Call accounting systems can tell you which lines you are getting no traffic on. Or which line carried the 48 hour call to Germany. Either way, you can figure quickly which lines and trunks are working, overloaded, not working, etc.

Long Distance Bill Verification.
Was the bill from your chosen long distance phone company accurate? Mostly, it isn't. Using a call accounting system to check your long distance gives you some peace of mind - and documentation to back up your request for a refund of overpayments you may have made.

Trace Calls.
True story: Every third or fourth Friday afternoon a large factory received bomb threats. They'd clear and search the factory and not find anything. By the time they'd checked, it was too late to start up production. One day, by checking their call accounting records, they discovered that the calls were coming from a phone on the factory floor. The whole thing had been a ruse to get the afternoon off. Tracing calls can be important when legal documentation is needed to prove a call took place, or to find the extension that a 911 call came from, etc.