Call Accounting Featured Article

Historical Call Archive is a Critical Element of Call Accounting

  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

With telecom bills soaring thanks to new needs – mobility, connectivity and the “Internet of Things” – and budgets remaining flat, more organizations are attempting to take their telecom expenditures into hand and ferret out sources of waste, fraud and duplication. Call accounting solutions can help do this by tracking call usage and call detail records and allowing companies to control telecom usage, telecom costs and employee activity.

A good call accounting solution supports collection and processing of CDR from all telecom sources, including premise-based PBXs and VoIP servers, Centrex and other hosted services, local and long distance carriers, conference services and wireless handsets, to facilitate consolidated reporting and analysis of an organization’s entire voice network. It makes it easier to assign telecom costs by department, engage in carrier bill reconciliation, create future telecom budgets and find waste. But a good call accounting solution should do more than that.

Since many organizations are called upon to regulate their telecom usage, at least in part, according to federal law (think financial services and healthcare), companies shopping for a call accounting solution should look into a feature called “historical call archive” that allows them to easily search for the past data they may need for audits, according to the website of ISI Telemanagement Solutions, which provides call accounting solutions. Even companies that aren’t regulated by federal law may need to research their call histories in case of future litigation.

“With call reporting, organizations can take advantage of not only the ability to report on calls, but they also gain a searchable archive of historic call data,” according to the company. “This on-demand access to call history provides a platform to satisfy a number of possible regulatory directives, including HR or litigation research.”

Companies should look for a call accounting solution that is easy to use and offers a Web user interface that provides authorized users access to a customizable dashboard, a menu of pre-defined reports, a custom report designer and an on-demand traffic analysis tool to address any reporting need and allow decision makers to make informed business decisions for their organization. While your organization probably can’t cut back on telecom usage without harming the business, it can ensure that telecom resources are being used wisely and cost-effectively.