Hosted PBX

Several of our clients were struggling with their phone system capabilities and maintenance costs. After looking into other hosted PBX providers, we found that none can provide a cost effective solution for non-profits. So, we decided to look into providing our own hosted PBX offering as a non-profit exclusively for non-profits. To provide a cost effective, feature rich and extensible solution, we researched and brought together products and services to create an offering at prices that non-profits can afford.

Our hosted solution brings together world class providers at a non-profit discounted price schema with flexible options. IT4NP staff would meet and discuss your organization’s needs and budget and develop a solution to fit your specific requirements. This includes:

Assessing your current voice solution costs, functionality, and usage statistics
Perform a preliminary evaluation to see if IT4NP’s voice solution would provide a cost benefit or major feature enhancement
Understand how the current voice solution calls are handled today
Gather feedback to understand pain points and ideas for call handling tomorrow
Identify functionality gaps for current voice solution and potential future voice solution
Create a solution document detailing the new platform’s call handling, devices, costs, and capabilities
Present the proposed solution

IT4NP’s Hosted PBX solution pricing is based on usage, not on ‘per line-per month’ charges. To provide an example of how this greatly affects overall costs, we will provide a real-world example that IT4NP provided to one of our supported organizations.

One of our clients was struggling with their cable provider’s voice solution. The cable company provided two analog lines with their main incoming phone number on one and a rollover line on the other. The organization was using these two lines with a mutli-handset cordless phone system. The system worked okay, until they had two lines in use. Any incoming calls after that went straight to the cable provider’s voicemail, meaning they were missing potentially important calls. There was no capability for transferring calls (other than finding the intended call recipient and having them join the line on another cordless), and all messages were handled by the receptionist, written down and delivered to the recipients.

IT4NP performed an assessment, gathered details from the staff and created a new solution. The new system would put a handset on every desk and common area, provide a means to continue to use the multi-handset cordless devices, a call handling plan to efficiently route incoming calls, direct inward dial phone numbers to each staff member, ability to see busy status and transfer calls, all while lowering their overall monthly cost by 35%. The table below details the costs of old and new:

Old System		New System
Cable Company Business Voice Solution	Cable Company Costs	IT4NP Hosted PBX Solution	Hosted PBX Costs
$40/line, unlimited usage 2 lines, ~ 1500 minutes usage per month	$80 / month	Hosted PBX	$25 / month 10+ simultaneous calls
Cable Modem/Voice Equipment Monthly Rental Fee	$15 / month	SIP Trunk per minute usage costs: $0.004 incoming calls $0.008 outgoing calls	$4 / month for 1000 minutes incoming $4 / month for 500 minutes outgoing ($8 / month total)
Taxes	~ $20 / month	IT4NP Support Fee Provides moves, adds, changes	$20 / month
		20 Telephone Numbers Direct Dial (DID)	$.50 per DID $10 / month
		Taxes	~ $11.27 / month
TOTAL	$115 / month	TOTAL	$74.27 / month

		Savings per month:	$40.73

The table above does not provide the entire story, as we still need to take into account the equipment costs (new phones and analog adapter). The organization purchased used Polycom VVX500 handsets and a Cisco SPA112 analog adapter. Their total spend for this equipment was $622, which led to about a 15 month return on investment based on an average monthly savings of $40.73.

IT4NP offers some flexible options for equipment procurement and can help negotiate with handset vendors for potential donation or deeply discounted hardware. While this is not always available, our goal is not to make a profit on equipment or the provided hosted PBX services but to cover our costs and expenses. We are a non-profit, just like you. This is our mission, to help your organization focus on your mission.