So you are in the IT services or Managed Services business and decided VoIP is for you and it is time to now offer this to your customers. You may have started doing some homework or been marketed to by a company who says they will "whitelablel" their service as your company and then provide you the mechanism to bill your customers for dial tone as part of that story. This sales person may even go as far to say as they will put in writing that they are responsible to make sure the tax & fees are calculated properly on your bills to your customers.
Here is the reality, calculating something doesn't actually handle the "rest" There are other factors such as filings, registrations,
acquiring a legal agent, compliances, 911 obligations, and returns with federal, state, county, city, as well as rules that may apply in each of those regions that are custom to a certain area. Please make sure you do your homework properly before you take what you hear for face value.
Here is a quick infographic from our friends at Nexvortex that give you some things to consider:
Let's also think for a minute about the state of the industry. Copper lines and circuits are very much starting to shrink and the
revenue tax bodies have benefitted from for decades is starting to shrink with it. Do you think that they will just sit back until their revenue streams extinguish or are they going to attack VoIP dial tone rules and taxation even harder to make up the difference?
There is nothing wrong with bundling and billing for dial tone along with Cloud PBX or Hosted VoIP given you are going to make that the focus of your business and can build the volume needed to make the numbers work with everything that has to be done to play by the rules. A BVoIP partner told me yesterday that it costs him over $15k per year to make sure everything is spot on as he sells dial tone to his customers under his own brand. This is not the normal route for BVoIP partners but he had already been registered and setup to do so prior to coming on board with BVoIP while most BVoIP partners do not bundle or bill for dial tone rather have a 3rd party bill for it instead. Take that into consideration as there are other costs other than just signing up with a company who offers you a platform to use making it seemling easy to do things but then doesn't really spell out the intricacies from the business perspective..
At the end of the day, if you are in the IT / MSP business you can safely offer Cloud PBX or Hosted VoIP without bundling or billing for dial tone and leave that part to companies you can partner with to do the heavy lifting. Concentrate on what you do best and don’t get caught up in an incomplete story that will end up costing you big in the wallet down the line.
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