Chargeback using Telecom Expense Management

Chargeback Using Telecom Expense Management by Peter Verhoeff

Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and call accounting software provides many tools to improve the viability of an organization. One of those is the ability to bill the telecom services and resources back to the divisions, department, sections or individuals who used them.

One area of application is for hotels and motels, where guests are billed for their telephone calls. This of course requires fast reporting as the telephone usage data needs to be available to include in the bill when the guest checks out. It is important for the call accounting software to interface easily to the hotel's property management system (PMS).

Having the call accounting system connected to the Internet makes it possible to rapidly and automatically update rate tables and permits the software vendor to do periodic online updates and maintenance of the system.

Another area of chargeback is at colleges and universities. Here the requirements are a little different from hotel billing. Faculty staff, projects or students may be billed monthly, with possibly different rates for sporadic and high volume users. A budget limit may be assigned to each entity. When the budget maximum is reached, further calls can be denied until the bill is paid or the budget ceiling is raised.

In legal and other professional offices it is important that the call accounting system be able to interface with the existing billing and accounting system, as many of the calling charges would be billed to clients, where phone numbers are associated with the firm's account codes.

In the general business arena, periodic billing can be performed automatically to departments, sections, projects, or individuals. For example, billing can be multi-tiered, where the corporation bills the department and the department bills the individuals within that department. For employees, the call accounting system can interface directly with the payroll system for automatic payroll deduction. The system would have a way of differentiating between billable and non-billable calls.

With modern call accounting systems all of the above functions are feasible, which allow companies to perform the complex billing tasks with little effort. The advantages of chargeback systems are many. It provides an accurate picture of usage patterns and an equitable distribution of telecom costs. This is not limited to telephone use, but can also include the use of such varied items as laptops, cell phones, and even on-demand software.

(1)www.321site.com/greg/courses/mis1/glossary.htm

Author, Peter Verhoeff, writes articles on the business benefits of call accounting and call detail record technology. More information can be found at http://www.telsoft-solutions.com.