In a corporate environment, there can be many departments with just as many varied and specific budgets. Keeping track of the expenses from department to department and who should pay for which charges can be overwhelming without some sort of a call detail records associated with call accounting software in place.

Consolidated billing, which is sometimes referred to as convergent billing, combines telecom billing onto a single statement for non PBX traffic. The ability to track telecom costs from multiple sources that are incurred throughout the entire network and to generate a single statement to bill back cost centers, departments, projects, or end users is often invaluable to corporations and allows for better cost analysis.

Telephones - voice, data, video and imaging - are some of your biggest expenses. They're a cost that should be allocated to the products you are making, or the departments and divisions in your company. Telephone costs can determine which product is profitable and which isn't. A software company recently dropped one of its three "big" software packages because phone calls for support got too expensive.

Even at the departmental level, client and project bill back for telephone charges incurred on their behalf can be what keeps costs to a manageable level.

Every lawyer, government contractor, and architect does it. It makes sense. It's a feature commonly used in shared tenant situations such as with the resale of long distance and local phone calls. As in a hotel/motel, hospital, shared condominium, etcetera, someone's got to send out the bills, and it's not the phone company. In fact, with a call accounting system, you can be your own phone company.

But even at the departmental level regardless of your industry, allocating costs can be a chore for corporate accounting departments, and a call accounting system can better manage those departmental budgets.