call accounting

 Call Accounting System is a telecommunications software or hardware application that captures, records, and costs telephone usage events. Internationally call accounting systems may be referred to as call logging systems. Call accounting systems detect outbound and inbound calls, call ring outs, call routings, abandoned calls, and other activities..

Common Applications of Call Accounting

Service Billing and Provisioning

Call accounting systems may provide packaging, pricing, provisioning, billing, and posting or presentment of telephone services for purposes of revenue generation. Professional services firms utilize call accounting software for account code or client based billing of their phone usage. The hospitality industry uses call accounting to resell phone services to visiting guests and groups. These call accounting systems often provide accessible application-specific rating and provisioning capabilities found generally on carrier-level operational support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS).

Departmental and Employee Chargeback

The original purpose of call accounting systems was within corporate entities for purposes of cost allocations within the enterprise. Enterprises use call accounting to allocate costs back to divisions, departments, and even individual employees. Such systems may also provide data directly to corporate accounting and human resource systems.

Cost and Revenue Optimization

Call accounting software can reconcile multiple telecom carrier's billing reports by integrating telecom invoices, wireless billing, long distance charges and calling cards into a single platform, allowing your business to use the convergent expense software to provide management reports, analytic reports, alerts and robust presentations

Staff Productivity

Call accounting systems provide visibility into the calling patterns and activity of employees and can be used to minimize productivity losses through non-business calling activity. They can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of revenue-generating staff and sales processes, and manage the responsiveness of customer service staff.

Network Optimization

Companies also use call accounting systems to determine whether their voice and data networks are being utilized efficiently, in a cost effective manner, or to capacity. Call accounting applications are used to monitor network activity and bandwidth, identify over- and under-used trunks to optimize trunking configurations, pinpoint the root cause of circuit outages, monitor call routing effectiveness, queue times, abandoned calls and other information, and report usage trends and statistics. Call accounting can help companies more efficiently allocate telecom resources and make better planning decisions affecting a telecommunications network.

Security and Compliance

Call accounting applications enable IT departments to shield companies from a variety of internal and external security threats by monitoring for network attacks, intrusion attempts and telecom activity that exceeds acceptable or established thresholds.
Call accounting applications help facilitate regulatory compliance by providing tools to aggregate, monitor and analyze telecommunications data in order to correctly track and report expenses. They can be used to enhance corporate accounting practices by documenting fraud-related costs to substantiate telephony-related disputes with carriers. And they can automate the monitoring of internal communications to improve visibility into sales and financial processes.