Call Accounting Solutions: What Are Your Options And How Do They Work?

Call Accounting Solutions: What Are Your Options And How Do They Work?
The most recent news in call accounting is the addition of telemanagement services. Call accounting data or call detail records are often times just presented as raw data and are not nearly as effective as when they are analyzed and evaluated by a telemanagement service. Most call accounting solutions on the market today come equipped with a telemanagement service to make it easier to evaluate the data you pulled with the call accounting software.

Integrating voice and broadband internet accounting into one accounting platform

By converging voice and data, many call accounting systems are able to provide a wide variety of services and options from billing to provisioning and accounting for broadband services. Much like traditional call accounting systems, these systems can be centralized or distributed. The ability to monitor internet and voice activities in one location makes for efficient management of telecommunications in an organization. Most companies are looking for one solution to cover all of their needs and call accounting systems often times provide that ?one stop shop? for customers.

Centrally Hosted Call Accounting

Most companies are looking to manage their telecommunications above and beyond any one PBX or communications server. By managing telecommunications at an enterprise level, companies are able to see a much faster return on investment due to the sheer volume of interactions and are able to adhere to one uniform process over all locations. Equally, most PBXs today are able to manage multiple points of presence across an enterprise and are not necessarily as restrictive as they once were. Many companies find the use of a centrally hosted enterprise call accounting solution the most effective for the management of their resources, whereas the traditional stand alone, geographically limited systems far less effective.

This is where application service providers come into play. With the ability to provide both stand alone and centrally hosted call accounting solutions, most Application Service Providers (ASPs) are able to fit the specific needs of their customers. Application service providers are also often times equipped with other software solutions like call recording and ACD reporting that can be quite effective when used in conjunction with a call accounting solution.

How Call Accounting Systems Work

Call accounting systems collect data from a key system, PBX, iPBX, or VoIP gateway. They pull the call detail records (CDRs) from one of the telephone systems listed above and send those call records to the telemanagement software to create reports and analysis of these records. The records can be pulled on all or selective extensions depending on the needs of the end customer. Costs and possibly revenue can be attached to the call activity that is reported, making accounting for telemanagement usage much more efficient.

Call accounting solutions are able to take the call records provided by the customer?s phone system and manage those records for the customer. Customers no longer have to sift through paper records to identify activity and cost allocation. That is done automatically with a call accounting solution making telecommunications cost management and fraud management much easier and more efficient for the end customer.


Call Accounting System
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