Team Audio Conferencing Toll free billing by cost center

Copper Contributor

Hello everyone,

 

I have looked online quite extensively for anything to answer my question, or find someone else who found themselves in my position, and what they did.

 

I have a customer who has fully adopted Teams. They use Call in Audio conferencing numbers for their Teams meetings regularly. They want to change these Audio conferencing numbers to a toll free number or numbers.

So I could simply add a toll-free conference bridge number, no problem. The problem is this organization is big, and they want to bill the Toll free minutes to different cost centers. So all of the minutes HR uses, go against HR's budget, same for Finance, operations,. etc etc. More challenging, some people may initiate Teams meetings and there for incur cost for different cost centers depending on the meeting.

How are other organizations tracking, and allocating Teams Audio conferencing costs?

 

As far as I can tell all we get is one big CSV with all billable calls, and very little detail to properly classify the call, and beyond that, it should not be up to some individual to review every single call per month, ask the person who initiated the meeting which coster center is fell under, and bill it out accordingly to different departments, that's insanely inefficient.

One thought I had was use 1 toll free number per cost center, and then just sort the CSV by confeence number, and boom you have your data, but there is no way for the Meeting Initiator to choose which Audio Conference number appears by default on their meeting invite, and that wont stop someone from simply clicking on the list of available numbers and choosing one designated to a different cost center to access the meeting, which would completely eliminate any data integrity.

I cant be the only person in this boat, can anyone point me in the right direction?

1 Reply
If the customer is in the US, going to Toll Free wouldn't be a great idea. Effectively most numbers are already toll free or the outbound toll is less than a 1-800 toll would be.
One of the goals would be to get everyone on an Internet client, with the Teams client or web client.
To break down the records, there may be some third party telephony billing applications that can do what you want, but it may be a lot easier and cost less to just create an average cost per user and add it to the basic costs.