Telephone Service Billing

As part of cost savings initiatives, Duke implemented a new process for telephone billing in coordination with the transition to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

The Office of Information Technology (OIT) no longer renders monthly telephone bills for Duke-provided land lines. Instead, billing and allocations has taken the place of monthly bills.  The basis for the JV is the actual costs associated with providing 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 is bundled into a single rate based on the type of line in service (e.g. VoIP analog, VoIP digital, etc.), and posted to specific 6982xx general ledger accounts.  The JV is 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.