How Call Accounting and Telecom Expense Management Help Guide Business Spending
September 04, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
As important as communications are to the large organization, so too is managing the costs associated with supported platforms, accounts and devices. The costs can be overwhelming and the task of management is nothing short of time-consuming. Dedicated call accounting software and a trusted party to provide telecom expense management are both essential to ensuring communications spending doesn’t exceed communications benefits.
Business2Community recently covered this topic in an article that stresses the benefits associated with software designed to help control telecommunications spending. One of the key advantages – aside from the management of costs – is that you don’t have to implement resources in-house. When on-site staff have to spend hours collecting billing data from multiple suppliers and make sense of it all, the money saved in the long run may not be enough to cover the cost of analysis.
For the international organization, billing data may be in various languages and currencies, and may even contain erroneous financial data. When this information is difficult to understand, it’s more likely the organization is being overcharged or incorrectly billed for services. It’s also possible that the organization is struggling to keep inventory current and ensure that the charges assessed are actually for devices in use. Likewise, call accounting needs to be in place to correctly assess usage across departments.
With sophisticated software and proven call accounting solutions, experts can easily manage telecom spend and provide the necessary intelligent insights that produce in-depth monthly reports. Businesses using this kind of approach to manage telecom costs gain complete clarity in order to stay in control of current usage and decisions for moving forward. The idea is to get away from the top-level summary charge approach to cost knowledge and dig into the details of the carrier’s data. The more informed you are, the better decisions you can make.
This approach to telecommunications control is essential given the growth in mobility throughout the global marketplace. Professionals are on the move and they have to have access to the corporate network regardless of location. According to the India Enterprise Mobility report, mobility has emerged as a top priority for most organizations, with a number of leading companies focused in on Bring Your Own Device strategies.
As 71 percent of surveyed organizations either have a mobility policy or are currently in the process of creating one, selecting the right platform to support the mobility strategy is key. The key focus when it comes to spending to support this trend includes telecom expense management, apps to support mobile collaboration and mobile device management.
Apalak Ghosh, Lead Analyst, Emerging Technologies, CMR said in a CIO piece, “The era of mobile enterprise has arrived. An entire ecosystem needs to be developed to support enterprise mobility. Design, development, deployment and maintenance of devices and applications will assume critical importance in this process. The report presents exciting opportunities for enterprise mobility vendors and attempts to provide a direction to enterprises to align their mobile policy to address the new requirements.”
What practices have you put in place to control your telecom spend?
Edited by Stefania Viscusi