Non-Business Calls and Call Accounting

In a recent survey of call accounting companies they were asked the question "In a typical company, what fraction of the total telephone costs can be attributed to private calls". The answered varied between 25 and 65 percent. The cost of a private telephone call consists of the cost of the call plus the time the employee spends on this unproductive activity.

In fact, the major cost of a private telephone call may be the productivity factor. Consider an employee with an hourly pay rate of $25 per hour. If the employee spends an average of 15 minutes per day on private calls, or approximately $6 per day of company time, this amounts to $1500 per year. In a company with 300 employees, this accumulates to almost $500 000 per year.

Add to this the cost of the telephone calls, take a telephone account and look at call charges, and conservatively estimate 33% of the cost is private calls. This amounts to a significant dint in a company's bottom line.

Can anything be done to reduce the cost of private use? - The phrase "what gets measured gets managed", is very true in Call Accounting. The first thing to do is measure the costs. This exercise is straight forward, if you do not have a Call Accounting system, get one.

Insert all your official company telephone numbers into the system, this includes suppliers, customers and your company cell phones and company office numbers. Run a Call Accounting report to detail the cost of calls to these telephone numbers and compare the figure with the total cost.

If you presently do not yet believe in Call Accounting, after this exercise you sure will. We are continually surprised at the small percentage of cost devoted to business calls.

The result will be so shocking you will disbelieve it, you will tell yourself "there must be more business numbers, what have I missed?" Start the process of accounting for the cost of calls to unknown destinations, it is not as difficult as it first appears to be.

Start with the big numbers, draw a report from the call accounting service for a list of the most costly destinations, those destinations that are not business numbers should be checked by walking to the person that made the calls and asking. "was it business or private, and if business please tell me what was the destination" This exercise will have sobering effect on employees.

Most likely, your staff will have no idea of the costs they are generating by their innocent use of the telephone. Be gentle with them, the majority are valuable company assets. Once staff are aware of the costly burden they place on the company most will change their habits out of courtesy and eagerness to be a valuable contributor to the health of the company. Some will not change, fortunately this is often the ones who are less valuable and need to get the message - Shape Up Or Ship out.


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A well known personality in tele-management, Mike Guile offers new clients a free trial of the world's best web based call accounting service. There's
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