13. Call Accounting / Call Reporting:
How to Manage and Track Your VoIP Communications

The call accounting and call reporting software has appeared along with the first phone calls.

The history of these applications is as old as the telephony itself. Without any doubts, every business needs to know what phone calls it pays for. With traditional call accounting software you can:

• track long-distance “friends & family” and other unnecessary calls and re-bill your employees,
• bill your clients for phone charges made on their behalf, because you have precise info about each call made,
• verify your long-distance phone bills.

All of the above is aimed to reduce your telecommunication costs.

What Have VoIP technologies Changed in Call Accounting Software?

With IP telephony deployed in your company, your phone calls to remote offices go through your IP network, so there are no toll charges and you only pay your ISP.

You can also eliminate your long-distance calls, if you partner with a VoIP network provider to route your international calls over the Internet to their gateways located in remote sites, which, in turn, route your calls to the local PSTN.

So, VoIP technologies have dramatically reduced the cost of phone calls, but even in VoIP environment call accounting software can still bring significant benefits to your business.

Allocate Phone Calling Costs Among Your Departments

With detailed reports, provided by call accounting software, you can allocate your telecom costs among your departments and divisions to analyze their expenses and profitability more efficiently.

Manage Your VoIP Traffic Effectively

Call accounting software allows you to analyze the VoIP traffic on each of your gateway and optimize its location in the most effective manner.

Motivate Your Sales People

As you have detailed reports about phone calls made by each sales person, you can measure his performance, compare it to others and manage your sales stuff accordingly.

Monitor Your VoIP Network

The real-time tracking of your phone calls will let you know immediately about lines you’re getting no traffic on, trunks overloaded etc.

Call Accounting Software Integration

Now let’s take a look at integration issues to be considered before you deploy call accounting software in your network.

First of all, you should be sure that the call accounting software you get will track all the phone calls in your company. Thus, it should support all the PBX systems used in your network. For those 3rd party legacy PBX systems that are not supported, a custom integration component can be built to parse the CDR records and import the data into your call accounting application.

Secondly, you may also need integration with ERP software. For example, you may want to automatically add telecom expenses, allocated among your departments, to your ERP software on regular basis.

And of course, when talking about allocating costs among departments, the call accounting system is to be integrated with your employee database (AD, LDAP directory or HR software).

Custom Call Accounting Software

As you can have up to date data about your employee phone calls, you can use it to build custom business-specific modules that help you to manage your telecom expenses better.

For example, you may want to set the limits for long-distance calls for your offices, departments or employees, so that once the limit is reached, the long-distance phone calls get blocked for a certain group of users until the administrator removes the limit.

Since most of the call accounting vendors allow 3-rd party applications to access the software data, you can use this information in any way you need, according to your business processes.

Call Accounting Vendors

Below you’ll find a list of several call accounting software vendors that support a range of mostly used IP PBX.

• CallTrack by TelSoft
• Call Accounting Mate by callaccounting.ws
• Call Accounting software by ISI Telemanagement Solutions
• Reliatel by Tone Software
• Shadow CMS by Resource Software International Ltd
• SierraGold by SAI
• VeraSMART by Veramark Technologies
• WinCall by Telemanagement Technologies

What to Do Next

The call accounting software gives you opportunities to manage your VoIP costs. How do you select the call accounting software?

• Check the supported PBX systems.
• Check, whether the web-interface is available.
• Learn about the analysis and reporting features.
• Examine integration capabilities.
• Learn about customization methods available to provide you with custom reports and extra-functionality you might need.

Read the next chapter: 14. Enterprise VoIP network management - Keep Track of Your IP Telephony Configuration

Comments: