What are typical company policies for personal cell phone use on company issued cell phones?
Answers
Regardless of plan: Justification for International Dialing
For local plans; shared or non-shared minutes: justification if they go over base plan set-up or large percentage of shared minutes.
The policy for your cell phone should match the policy for your land lines. Similar to land lines, international calls will pop out on the bill, as will expensive calls to Information. Creating a policy requires monthly reviewing bills and having documented penalties for non-adherence. Does the benefit of having a policy outweigh the costs?
1
I managed 40 cell phones and AT&T provided me with a data dump (standard) monthly.
10 minutes or less of work had the summary information in a spreadsheet for a) G/L distribution, b) Problem children & c) overall plan vs uses stats.
The "cost" was well worth the effort.
It depends on what plan you have. We allow personal phone calls as all calls are included in our plan (no additional cost). The big issue is texting as that is an extra cost. We have no use for texting on our business phones for work. As a result, we have not allowed personal texting on the business phones.
What I see from our customers (our solution automates the expense reporting process for small and mid-sized companies):
Most use our solution to set a monthly policy amount per each group of employees (i.e. Sales @$150/month, Executives unlimited). An overage is highlighted in the system and the employee can provide justification like international roaming from a business trip. Reviewers (managers and finance) can decide whether to approve the overage or not. The cell bill is also attached in the online system so a reviewer can look at it in detail if they want.
Other than extreme cases or problem employees, most companies set a reasonable amount for each employee based on their job function, geo, seniority and are fine with the expense up to that amount. Certainly there will be some personal benefit that the company is paying for - but the cost of processing time and employee morale is typically not worth the minimal cost saving.
We don't allow international phone calls.
We use phone cards and skype for international calls. There is a very convenient plans for international phone calls in skype and many other apps in any smartphone.