Who Gets The Cellular Bill?

According to soon-to-be-released research from In-Stat:

The most effective way for an organization to manage its telecommunications resources is to treat wireless the way most organizations treat wireline services and other business productivity services. This means that users contract for centralized billing for business lines and allow for some incidental personal usage.

Surveying 1023 business users, In-Stat found only 44 percent of employers used this approach. The slight majority let individuals negotiate a contract with a wireless carrier and submit it as an expense. According to In-Stat, however, "the administrative time spent completing expense reports and reviewing bills, etc. exceeds the costs of the personal calls that employees would have made if the employer."
The truth is, enterprises really need to get better at figuring out what their policy is going to be when it comes to billing for wireless services.
Letting users go off and purchase their own plan and device has the potential to eliminate any cost savings that can arise from purchasing services in bulk (I raised this point in a recent Buzzcut).

Fixed Mobile Convergence may be another way to help IT / telecommunications departments deal with reimbursing mobile usage charges. By having all calls go through the enterprise PBX, organizations can get a much better handle on calls by having a central point of auditing rather than trying to audit multiple wireless bills from employees or wasting employees' time by having them submit complex expense reports. Carriers (Sprint comes to mind, they demoed their billing management system to me at last year's CTIA) are also starting to put out services that allow enterprises to better audit mobile usage among employees.