It’s a fair assumption that we all use our business phones, if we have one, for private calls from time to time. Indeed, if we’re travelling on business, it’s only fair that we should. How can we be denied contact with our friends and family back home?

But it’s equally fair that we should be reasonable in our private use.

One way of controlling the issue might be to set a cap on the charges or minutes that an employee may use for private purposes, but this can often mean expensive and tedious administration. Getting your employees to go through an itemised phone bill on a spreadsheet each month would make them and you miserable.

Better to configure expense@work to manage the process.

In expense@work you can:

• Set up phone numbers in the same way as credit card numbers for each employee
• Import a phone statement (assuming it has columns for calling number, called number, charges, duration, time, etc.)
• Present a phone statement to each employee and ask them to mark each call as business or private, but…most importantly….
• Prefill ‘business’ or ‘private’ based on previously marked calls
• Optionally forward a form for authorisation if a certain value has been exceeded
• Pick up and forward for ‘exception approval’ calls that cost more than a certain value or calls to particular countries or numbers or at particular times
• Calculate the value of private calls above the cap set for an individual employee
• Provide management reporting and forensic inquiries on the data
• Export the value to be recharged to an employee for his or her private calls

All of this can co-exist with standard expense@work functions.

Watch this short video to see how it might work:

Recharging private calls