Call Accounting is used to accurately calculate telephone usage charges according to department, division, location, project team, workgroup or any other grouping. The purpose of Call Accounting is to control and reduce unnecessary telephone expenditure.

Some experts have pointed out that, besides office rental and staff payroll, the telephone bill represents the next substantial cost to any business. Not only do the actual costs eat into profit margins, they also affect the productivity of the workforce. Imaging an organization in which the staff spends as much as 50% of their working hours on the phone. If this is not a Contact Center or telemarketing firm, a few immediate questions automatically spring to one's mind. How high are this company's monthly phone bills? How much of this expenditure is recoverable? If most of the expenditure is not recoverable, one wonders why there is such a high volume of calls. Which project, section, department, division or branch generated these calls? Are the calls of a personal nature? If they are, obviously productivity of the staff is affected. Thus lies the value of Call Accounting in resolving these issues raised.

With the reports generated from Call Accounting , the company can allocate, manage, control and reduce a significant portion of their operational expenses. Some experts have even claimed that Call Accounting is able to reduce the monthly phone bills by as much as 30%.

The information can be used for invoicing purposes, or evaluating business costs or for mapping out business strategies.

The PowerX2011™ Call Accounting product can cater to small, medium or large companies; regardless of size.

The PowerX2011™ Call Accounting product provides the following benefits:

Recovery of costs: The Call Accounting system provides enough details of calls to enable companies to generate invoices for recovering chargeable phone costs from their clients.

Derivation of accurate business costs: The ability of the Call Accounting software to automatically allocate costs to the appropriate cost centers enable companies to correctly price business activities. The cost centers could be project, section, department, division, branch, extension or group of extensions, ACD workgroup or collection of ACDs, project, ad hoc promotion or other business events. Even when the costs are not chargeable to customers, Call Accounting generates sufficient call information for management to accurately project the cost of undertaking similar efforts when they bid for a piece of work, plan a campaign, identify ways to streamline the cost of operation or restructure the organization.

Generation of additional revenue: The Call Accounting system has a built-in function to impose a tariff on the phone call. This rate is determined by the company and helps to defray other incidental costs like administrative charges besides the actual costs payable to the carrier providers. It is not unusual for companies to incorporate a profit into the calculation, hence increasing their profit margins.

Monitoring of unauthorized/fraudulent usage: The reports generated by the Call Accounting system can be used to identify any unauthorized usage of the company phone lines for web access or for special services via "1-900" numbers. Such services are usually of a personal nature and tend to be expensive. They include chat lines, horoscope services, playback of jokes, audio based games, contests, donations, etc. Any access to such services will be reflected along with the extension numbers of the caller. Hence Call Accounting can be successfully used to track down such abuses.

Reduction of unnecessary expenses: The reports generated by the Call Accounting system also shows usage of expensive phone services such as directory assistance services. Although such calls may be made for official business and their charges are generally lower than the "1-900" numbers, collectively they could cause a big dent in the company's monthly overheads. For instance a company has 500 extensions. If the cost of each directory assistance call is $1.00 and an average of 10% of the work force uses this service daily, the total monthly bill for directory calls alone would have amounted to $1,500.00. The Call Accounting system can be used to effectively monitor such expenditure.

Control costs: From the reports generated by the Call Accounting system, management is able to monitor the cheapest routing cost as well as identify the least cost media to use for communication in different projects or for different purposes. This helps the company save on operational costs.

Better personnel management: As the Call Accounting system captures call information, the presence of such a software deters staff from making too many personal calls. This reduces the unproductive time spent on personal calls and gives employees more time to work. Hence the Call Accounting system can be used as a management tool to improve staff performance.

Higher productivity: Since the Call Accounting application provides a means to monitor calls through the reports generated, the employees are motivated to cut down on the average call duration. In this way, they can handle a larger volume of calls.

More efficient phone system: From the reports produced by the Call Accounting system, the administrator is able to identify any faulty extensions or lines not operational amongst the company's trunk lines. Hence the Call Accounting system is also used to monitor the efficiency of the telephone system and enables appropriate rectification to be carried out to the faulty lines or extensions, etc.

Better resource management: Based on the reports generated, the company is able to control and remove or re-deploy resources such as underused or unused trunk lines, phones, etc. This helps to eliminate unnecessary resources that drain company profits.

Connectivity: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product works with any PABX, key phone system or any telephone network

Real-time data collection and automatic writing to database: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product uses processors to record the call information. This faster mode of recording enables the data to be captured real-time. Hence it is able to calculate in real time the communication costs of a particular extension, department, cost center, trunks, trunk groups, groups of extensions, automatic call distribution (ACD) work groups, branch, etc. .

Call statistics: This offers many other telephony and communication related services. Some such features include the call traffic analysis information, call response information, messages, etc. This information can be organized in any most suitable form for analytical or monitoring purposes for example by phone extension or by work group. The information may be printed or displayed real time online.

Monitoring tool: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product is an effective tool for tracking the usage and costs of different types of call such as outgoing, incoming, trunk-to-trunk, internal calls, etc. capture all calls regardless of incoming, outgoing and even calls amongst the internal extensions within the company. It can capture both completed and uncompleted calls and even incoming caller ID/ANI.

Hospitality: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product supports hospitality applications for example PMS (Property Management System).

Business Invoicing: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product supports the allocation of all telephone time, charges and exports the call information to various office invoicing programs such as business invoicing software, databases and legacy systems.

Network enabled: It is fully network aware. When used in a network environment, sharing of files is possible.

Unlimited call volume: It has capacity for unlimited call volume

Extensive media coverage: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product can track web calls or VoIP, facsimile transmissions, etc besides the normal PSTN phone calls. This provides companies with a more comprehensive control over their communication expenses.

Inter extension details: As a call is transferred from one extension within the organization to another, the PowerX2011™ call accounting product can capture the call details for each extension as soon as the call is terminated at one extension and transferred to another. It is even able to provide such finite details as the cost of each section of his call and not just a mere cost of the entire call.

Forced account codes (FAC): Many companies assign forced account codes (FAC).to employees who have to make long distance calls are given specific authorization codes to dial before the usual phone number of the receiving party. This enables all calls made to be reflected under their names in the reports that are generated for staff monitoring, invoicing and other analytical purposes. There is no limit to the number of FACs that the PowerX2011™ call accounting product can support.

Authorization codes and account codes: Account codes are self-configurable codes to identify projects, billing references. With the use of account codes, users do not need to use different handsets when they use the telephone for different projects. Instead they enter different account codes before they use the same handset to dial out or at the end of an incoming call just before they replace the handset. This helps the system to differentiate the different cost centers when producing reports that could be used for invoicing. There is no limit on the number of account codes the PowerX2011™ call accounting product can support.

Multi carrier tariff rate tables: Companies can create price plans for multiple carriers in the phone system. The call accounting product can capture all detailed information such as the identity of the carrier, carrier name, carrier profile and the type of call can be generated in the reports and all the types of calls available from the telephone system including local call, intra-country (inter state) call, international call and internet call.

Markup to tariff rates: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product supports markups to the existing tariff rates. This enables the call accounting facility to supply data to generate reports of call charges complete with markups.

Reprocessing of call charges: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product supports reprocessing of call charges. This gives companies the flexibility to retrieve call information, revise the tariff rates, recalculate the charges and generate revised reports based on the new changes.

Real time online reports: As the information is collected real time and call data are automatically processed, the online displayed are also based on real time.

Reports: Besides online reports, the information from the call accounting product can be used to generate batch and ad hoc reports.

Export of reports: It provides support for emailing and exporting of reports in a variety of file formats including PDF, HTML, RTF, ASCII, CSV and DBF

Maintenance GUI: The PowerX2011™ call accounting product is designed with user-friendly screen based interfaces for the creation and maintenance of carriers, tariff rates and all other administration requirements.