Companies implement their own call accounting solutions to ensure telecom-billing accuracy while telecom giants spend billions to attract new customers

According to their annual report available on their website, in the last fiscal year-ending, SBC spent over two-and-a-half billion dollars on advertising. Verizon’s annual report shows just over two billion. Sprint, nearly a billion. AT&T (who had stripped back their advertising budget) just under half a billion. MCI, just over one hundred million. Qwest, a little over fifty million. These figures are, of course, astounding -- many corporations will never see such income amounts in their entire lifetimes, let alone advertising budgets. But such information begs the question, if a telecom carrier can spend a fortune on advertising to attract new business, why can't they invest a fraction of that amount to ensure accurate billing to their customers? Because of billing inaccuracies, customers are forced to implement their own call accounting solutions.

The fact that existing customer billing problems are being neglected by carriers while they spend these advertising billions shows up in numerous statistics. For example, an Aberdeen Group report found that, without proper call accounting on a customer's part, telecom billing cost leakage can be $8 million per year. A Gartner Group analyst was recently quoted as stating that 12 to 20 percent of corporate telecom charges are in error, and 85 percent of such errors are in the carrier's favor. Not long ago, one corporation discovered it had been erroneously charged over $50,000 for locations sold to another company.

Telecom billing errors also place corporations in danger of non-compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley act, which requires companies to be fully accurate when reporting operating expenses. So companies, not being able to rely on carrier bills to accurately cost account their phone usage, are forced to find cost-effective call accounting solutions.

Fortunately for the customers, robust call accounting software solutions such as TelSoft Solutions MegaCall now exist, allowing companies to accurately track call expenses and quickly compare them to telecom bills. Billing errors can be rapidly found and corrected through a real-time web-accessible interface. In addition, calls can be rated against contract usage rates, costs can be allocated to the correct user department, and reporting can be automatically and quickly generated in relation to traffic, fraud and analysis.

MegaCall tracks telephone call activity generated by any type and any number of PBXs from call record source to assignment of accountability. It analyzes call activity for an entire enterprise from a single web-enabled centralized system. All information is collected in real-time and is immediately available for viewing and reporting -- an essential support for call accounting throughout the enterprise.

About TelSoft Solutions, Inc.

TelSoft Solutions is a California-based privately held corporation located in the financial district of Glendale, California. Since 1985, TelSoft has been providing call accounting and telecom billing services to organizations with as few as 100 stations to large multi-location companies exceeding 100,000 employees. TelSoft enjoys meeting the challenges presented by their clients, many of whom have unique telecom expense management needs. Telsoft Solutions can be found on the web at www.telsoft-solutions.com