Call accounting

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 Call Accounting
2 Hospitality
3 See also
4 External links
5 References

[edit] Call Accounting

"Call accounting software is a system that records, translates and reports on telephone call activity. The software is used by most corporations to control expenses, allocate cost and increase productivity. Hotels, hospitals and other hospitality environments utilize call accounting to resell telephone calls to their clientele.."^[1] Professional firms utilize call accounting software for account code or client billing. Other uses include corporate cost allocation, traffic analysis, cost comparisons, invoice reconciliation and tracking misuse and abuse.

Generally, call accounting systems provide a software module or hardware storage buffer that collects data from an Internet Protocol server, PBX or Key system when a call is made and attaches a cost and a location to the call. Most communication servers or telephone systems have the capability to send call information out of a serial port or via a proprietary network service. The call accounting system has a capturing module or capturing buffer box that is then able to store the data.

The data collected usually includes calling party, date, time, duration, destination party and authorization or account code. This data is sometimes called Call Detail Recording (CDR) or Station Message Detail Recording (SMDR).

[edit] Hospitality

For the Hotels, it is advisable to have the telephone carrier setup a facility called Answer Supervision to let the PBX know that a Call was actually made successfully. If this is not in place, attempted calls without any answers, will be billed as a valid calls, causing guest queries.

NOTE: Guest may still generate queries if they called another party and connected to a voice mail or fax, but in theory these are valid calls and the Carrier may still bill for these call, even though to the user it may not have been valid.

For General Business, this facility is also desirable, since most businesses compare their Telephone bills with the Call Accounting bills and Answer Supervision is critical in ensuring accurate comparisons.

There are many vendors on the market with call accounting solutions that cater to general business, professional and the hospitality industry.