As an Administrator in Connect, you will want to track how many minutes are being used by your Meeting Hosts, sometimes to allow you to bill minutes back to your departments and sometimes just to see who is using the licenses, and who is not using the licenses. Of course if the licenses are not being well used then you can assign them to a more ‘needy’ party!
Cost Center Reporting
Important Note – Cost Center reporting cannot be applied after the fact, meaning you cannot build Cost Centers today and get reporting form the last 3 months for your account. It reports on usage from the time you enable and set up the Cost Centers.
For the most detailed reporting you can use the ‘Cost Center’ option within Connect. I am not going to cover that in detail here, but I will give you the 2 minute guide (the other options are later in this post if you want to skip the Cost Centers):
- Under the ‘Administration’ tab, select ‘Users and Groups’ and then the ‘Cost Centers’ option (See Figure 1 below)
- Check the box ‘Enable Cost Center Reporting’
- Choose how you would like to allocate the minutes from your account meetings. You can either choose to allocate the minutes to the primary Host of the Meeting Room, or to each individual attendee, or you can have the Meeting Host determine how the minutes are allocated (you would use this last option if you wanted to allocate minutes to a client for example, but use the same Meeting Room for all client meetings). If you let the Meeting Host allocate the minutes however, you are potentially allowing them to allocate minutes to another department!
- If you have a Burst Pack on your account then you can choose how they might be allocated as well from here
Figure 1
Now that you have enabled the Cost Center option, you need to create some Cost Centers and assign people to them:
- Select the ‘Manage Cost Centers’ option and build or edit the Cost Centers from there (See Figure 2)
- Go to ‘Users and Groups’, select a user and then ‘Information’ and ‘Edit Information’ (Figure 3), select ‘Choose’ under the ‘Cost Center’ field
- Now select the Cost Center from the next dialogue box and remember to click ‘Save’ for each screen (Figure 4)
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
If you have selected the option to allow Meeting Hosts to choose the Cost Center to which the minutes are assigned, then when they build the Meeting Room they will have the option to choose how the minutes are assigned (Figure 5)
Figure 5
To run a report on Cost Center usage, go to the ‘Reports’ tab and then ‘System Usage’ and select ‘Cost Centers’ from the drop-down menu. Select your Cost Center as shown in Figure 6 below.
Figure 6
You will likely want to filter the report by date and remove some of the fields in the report, the output should look similar to the option in Figure 7 below. You can click on the name to get a more detailed summary for that user.
Figure 7
You can also select the option to ‘Download Report’ and the Excel version can be quite informative (see example in Figure 8)
Figure 8
Regular Reporting on Meeting Usage
There are less granular reports available on Meeting minutes without using the Cost Center options. A brief description of these reports follows:
- Go to the ‘Reports’ tab
- Select ‘System Usage’ and then from the drop-down menu select ‘Group Usage’
- Select the ‘Meeting Hosts’ group. You probably want to filter by a date period and I tend to remove the spurious fields as well
- The report would look a little like the one in Figure 8 below
The Host minutes are likely the numbers you care about and you can sort based around that field by clicking on the column header to see the busiest users. The field ‘Last Login Date’ can also be useful for determining who is using the tool. You can download this to a spreadsheet and manipulate the data there too (Figure 9).
Figure 9
Figure 10
