Dec 06/Jan 07

Staff at businesses with 500 mobile phone handsets spend up to a thousand hours a month trying to manage, identify and recover personal call charges - costing their organisation at least £64,200. That's the assessment of QED, which undertook the research for Vodafone.

In response, Vodafone has launched a system called Spend Manager, which aims a promoting better management of company mobile phones. It has three components, Split Bill, Mobile Salary Saver and Employee Discount Scheme. The first and last are relatively self-explanatory; Mobile Salary Saver allows employees to sacrifice a part of their pre-tax gross salary in return for a mobile phone connected to a Vodafone Retail price plan.

According to Vodafone, Split Bill alone can save organisations as much as 90 per cent of administration costs.