The Importance of Understanding Billing with an Answering Service

Knowing what you are being billed is only a part of understanding the cost of an answering service to your business.  The real key is understanding how you are being billed.

An important question you must ask your answering service is what is their billing periods.  Is it a month to month billing cycle or is it every 28 days.  There can be a huge difference over the course of a year between the two.  A 28 day billing period accounts for a partial billing period for every month.  In a typical non leap year, six months of the year have 30 days and 6 months of the year has 31 days.  In a 28 day billing cycle you will have 6 months of the year with 2 days unaccounted for and you will have 6 months of the year with 3 days unaccounted for.  The total of all the days unaccounted for is 30 days.  Those extra days will be billed as an extra invoice during the course of a year which also means you will receive an additional base rate during the course of the year.   All City does it differently.  We bill you on a month to month basis with 12 invoices in a 12 month period.  There are no hidden costs with us.

Another question you must ask your answering service is what their rounding rate is.  The rounding rate is the fraction that the call is rounded to.  An example is a call that lasts 34 minutes.  Is it rounded for billing purposes to 40 seconds or is rounded to the next full minute which would be 1 minute.  Some services do the next full minute of rounding.  This would greatly affect your usage rate so you wouldn’t be comparing apples to apples when deciding on an answering service.  At All City Communications we only round to the 1/10^th of a minute, so a 6 second call will only be rounded to 10 seconds.  This can be a great savings for your company. 

Finally, review any additional line items for services that you currently use.  Examples of additional line items may be texting charges, patching charges, and any term a specific answering service may use for an additional surprise service charge.  All City Communications is upfront with pricing and offers an extremely competitive rate.  We have many customized packages that will fit your needs so you will not be paying for additional minutes you may never use.