Call accounting software is a system that records, translates and reports on telephone call activity. The software is used by most corporations to control expenses, allocate cost and increase productivity. Call accounting generally recieves Station Message Detail Records (SMDR) or Call Detail Records (CDR) from a telephone system through any of various protocls including serial, IP and file transfer.

SMDR is a feature that's available for most telephone systems and IP PBXs. The data is generally a system log of call traffic which includes call direction, date and time of the call, length of call, extension and trunk or line. There are various other pieces of information such as authorization code and account code that may be optionally available according to the capability of the hardware. The raw or unprocessed SMDR output of the telephone system is often too volumous and difficult to read.

A call accounting software packages utilizes SMDR data and translate the information into a simplified database format for further analysis. The data is often presented in graphical, detailed or summary reports by extension, departments or other corporate levels.

The expense of a telephone call has been steadily decreasing with the development of peer to peer free calling, flat rate plans and bundled services. Call accounting software packages that historically focused on telephone tracking and expense management have transformed themselves into comprehensive communication management systems (CMS). These systems include extension, line, operator, auto attendant, ACD, IVR, voice mail and other facility traffic.

A chance to track call duration, call distribution, ring time, hold time and call queues has allowed leading communication management systems to analyze and measure productivity.

Toll fraud analysis remains a component of most major CMS systems. However, there now exist new threats in bandwidth hacking which can result in poor performance for VoIP traffic, security breach and network shutdown. New CMS systems pinpoint irregularities, bottlenecks and network overflows and suggest recommended corrective action.