Many businesses and organizations employ a "use it or lose it" strategy when it comes to setting annual budgets, particularly in the technology sector. Often the end of year budgets yield a frenzied spending spree on the latest gadgets without any real perspective on whether or not the purchase is even beneficial to the company. Any surplus can be the ideal time to consider a tried and true technology purchase that can actually generate a return on investment - call accounting systems.

Telecom managers wrestle daily with keeping track of a vast inventory of telecom equipment, vendors, bills, and endpoints, not to mention the time it takes to sort out who made what call and to which department it should be allocated.

The benefits and return on investment of a call accounting system far outweigh the initial costs.

Cost allocation is used to hold departments, divisions or individuals accountable for usage and to ensure they stay within budgets. Calls can be charged back to departments for phone costs based on their actual usage. A call accounting software can save time and labor by distributing telecom expenses by department. Often personal calls or calls that don't normally fall within the corporate calling patterns can be billed back to the person or department. By keeping track of call detail records of each department, project or product, it can be determined which are profitable and which aren't.

Take employee productivity. Call accounting systems can be used to provide managers with reports showing number of calls, types of calls, cost, average duration for each person/station; evaluate calling patterns and calls completed per hour (useful for collection agents, customer service agents, telemarketers and sales persons); monitor the number of incoming calls per hour to correctly estimate the number of staff needed at the right time and at the least cost; verify the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Analyzing how an employee spends time on the phone can be an effective measure of productivity.

Traffic Analysis is a good way to track needless spending. Telecom managers can monitor the efficiency of the phone system by locating unused trunks and can verify the correct routing of calls in order to achieve cost effective routing. Additionally, call accounting can help to spot fraudulent or incorrect billing practices by vendors, as well as identify and provide documentation of down trunks and malfunctioning circuits that may make it possible to obtain rebates from vendors.

One of the greatest ROIs that can be enjoyed through a call accounting system is the ability to catch and minimize toll fraud and internal phone abuse. Toll Fraud costs businesses billions of dollars per year according to the FCC. Repeated incoming call attempts over a trunk can indicate hacker attempts to gain access to the switch in order to loop back through it for outgoing call purposes. By using a call accounting system, you can identify suspicious calling patterns, monitor 411 and directory assistance calls, check for abuse of incoming 800 calls from employees' friends and relatives; track illegal or suspicious destinations to the station originating them; monitor production time spent on the phone. Legal departments can track employees suspected of revealing confidential information to competitors, the news media, or headhunters, and can provide proof that a call took place in the event of obscene or harassing calls.

When planning for end of year budgets, telecom managers can be the heroes with a purchase or upgrade of a call accounting system with a call detail record feature that can provide a cost savings benefit that will stretch far into the future and is easily applicable now with legacy PBX systems, or later with VoIP deployment.