Was that a business call or personal call? The IRS wants to know and so do enterprises. Some colleges have recently found to their dismay that they did not keep adequate records and have ended up with considerable financial penalties. The University of California, San Diego had to pay $186,471 in taxes while the University of California, Los Angeles paid $239,196 in taxes to the IRS. Neither kept track of end users' cell phone usage.But wireless usage is more than about the potential tax liabilities. The more wireless phones, the more staff is needed to manage wireless operations and billing. How much does your enterprise spend? How do you differentiate between personal and business calls? How many different plans are in use? Is there a way to reduce expenses without limiting wireless usage?
The TDM and IP Telephony platforms can provide this information and cost control because of their centralized operation. Wireless phones, on the other hand, can be all over the place with no single provider. The decentralized approach of wireless operation fosters poor management and cost control.
A Yankee Group study in 2008 found that 47% of the survey respondents allowed the employee to acquire the wireless plan. The enterprise did not see the bill, only the expense report. According to Lyrix, Inc., the claims for wireless business usage are about 30% higher than the actual cost. It is hard to determine if the higher cost is round up error, poor wireless plan selection or the expense report includes personal calls. In any case, the enterprise could significantly rein in their costs with a global view of all the wireless phone usage.
Many users prefer to use their own phones for business. The research indicates that there is a shift to the personal liability plans:
* Yankee Group reported in 2008 that 47% of enterprise users were on personal liability plans.
* Yankee Group reported again in May 2009 an increase in personal liability plans to 50%.
* In-Stat Research reported in July 2009 that the increase was to 55% personal liability plans.
IT departments are struggling to control wireless costs. The challenges are to accurately separate the personal from business calls, reimburse the user and to comply with the IRS requirements. The continuing increase in personal liability plans only increases the burden for the IT department.
Lyrix has a clever solution: Use the cloud and a phone-resident app to solve the problem. Mobiso 6 is a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering that not only collects usage information but provides services that cross multiple wireless phone platforms and service providers.
The SaaS service offers a solution that is the same for all users independent of wireless device. The resident app collects the usage details. It automates the expensing of businesses and personal calls for the IT staff, and saves considerable labor time and insures accuracy of the reports.
There is also another value of the SaaS solution. It automates the accounting of expenses for the user. The solution also provides a cloud based address book and unified contact information. This alleviates the need for multiple teams to mange and update ever changing contact lists.
The Mobiso solution and how to think about its use are covered in a white paper, "The Growing Need for a Smarter Wireless Management Strategy for Business," (PDF). The white paper has a long list of suggestions for a personal-liability wireless management program. A free trial download of the phone-resident app is available at http://mobiso.com/Try-Now. The app is supported in Blackberry phones and will be available for the iPhone soon. The Mobiso solution is also compatible with Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Internet Explorer6.0+ and Mozilla Firefox 2.0+.
Lyrix was established in 1996. It has produced speech enhanced directories for speech attendants and speech-assisted mobile address books.
