Change in Telephone Billing Process

As part of the cost savings initiatives, Duke is introducing a new

process for telephone billing in coordination with the transition to

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

The Office of Information Technology

(OIT) will no longer render monthly telephone bills for Duke-provided

land lines. Instead, a new billing/allocation method using a standard

monthly journal voucher (JV) will take its place. The basis for the JV

will be the actual costs to provide local and long distance service.

While long distance is not “free” to

Duke, tracking and billing individual calls is cost prohibitive. As

such, the costs for local and long distance service will be bundled into

a single rate based on the type of line in service (e.g. VoIP analog,

VoIP digital, non-VoIP analog, non-VoIP digital, etc), and posted to new

6982xx general ledger accounts. The JV will be updated annually based

on an inventory of current phone lines. If lines are added or removed

during the year, the corresponding change to the JV will generally take

place at the beginning of the following fiscal year.

New phone line rates will be lower than

the current rates. The savings in FY11 will depend upon the type of

line. The rates will be even lower in FY12 once VoIP has been fully

implemented and all existing phone lines migrated. Each management

center will be working with departments on how these savings are to be

utilized.

Finally, in the event billing changes are

necessary going forward (e.g. one or all phone lines in a department

need to be billed to another cost center), end users can request such a

change through the existing OIT website for telephone related changes, where a link to an online form for billing changes is available.

If you have any questions about the

change in the telephone billing process, please contact the Office of

Budgets & Analysis at budgetduke.edu. Thank you.