Call Data Record

On any given day, many accounting firms must reform through countless paper statements for a variety of telecommunication services billed as the VoIP phone, cellular, paging, calling cards, and even network services such as Centrex. Many companies can minimize the administrative burden to reconcile both statements each month to implement an accounting system call.

The consolidated billing, which is sometimes known as convergent billing combines telecommunication billing on one return for non-PBX traffic such as those mentioned above. The ability to track costs of telecommunications from multiple sources that are involved in the entire network and generate a single statement to return the invoice cost centers, departments, projects or end users is often invaluable for business and allows a better analysis of costs.

The monitoring of such system is made possible by the Call Data Records (CDR) formats. Detailed Call Data Records to both local and long distance can be used for checks, billing reconciliation, network management and monitoring telephone usage to determine volume of phone usage, and abuse of your office phone system. CDRs are an asset in managing long-long-distance telephone costs and aid in the planning of future telecommunications needs.

A good accounting system will call an interpreter prior to responding to the constant changes of CDR formats from different vendors. The system should support formats from almost any provider / carrier, including ASCII, flat file, billing or CDR formats, etc., and for many systems, pre-existing definitions are available for AT and Popular T, SBC, T-Mobile, BellSouth, Nextel, Verizon, MCI, Sprint, Qwest, and RBOCs formats.

Select a call accounting system that is designed to receive data from supplier websites, transfer files from media or CD ROM drive for import into the database. This place all billing information in the same database, with an engine in which consolidated reports can be produced by the employee and the fees charged to the appropriate cost center, department, etc as recurring or non-recurring costs.