Telecom billing can be a complex task to manage. Many vendors make it difficult to find and understand every single cost included in your invoices. And this only gets harder if you’re a large enterprise, with a multitude of different vendors, contracts, and locations to keep track of.
The Complexity of Telecom Bills
It’s common to struggle with understanding the true range of your telecom environment. From your chosen vendors to the devices that your end-users utilize, and everything in between, costs can easily pile up.
Dealing with problems like bill quality and each vendor’s method of billing becomes a burdensome task. Your internal teams may not know where to start when it comes to totaling up the numbers, checking for accuracy, and searching for cost discrepancies.
They have more important issues to manage rather than dealing with poor-quality telecom billing. It’s easy to miss out on opportunities to discover savings.
The Structure of Your Telecom Bills
A telecom bill includes a breakdown of everything that your organization is paying for. This includes monthly recurring charges (MCR), non-recurring charges (NRC), and other charges such as regulatory fees or taxes.
However, vendors deliver their telecom bills in different ways, and invoice content varies between vendors. Some are reliable and accurate, but some carriers only provide a minimal amount of information. This makes it difficult to truly optimize your telecom spend and correctly allocate chargebacks. And your teams struggle to truly understand what makes up your telecom bills.
They must consider each vendor's bill quality, geographical location, language, currency, and methods of payment. Without a standardized, central place to manage this, it’s an ever-growing and inefficient process.
It’s easy to miss overcharges on your bills that add up to serious amounts. For example, one global company achieved $2.43 million in cost reductions by improving accuracy across billing and other telecom expense management processes.
Understanding and standardizing your telecom billing is a cost-saving opportunity you can’t afford to miss. This is where an audit or telecom bill audit software can help.
How to Improve Your Telecom Billing: Audit vs. Software
Your teams can work with a telecom expense management (TEM) provider to quickly and efficiently find ways to improve the accuracy of your telecom billing. There are two ways this can be achieved.
1. Telecom Expense Audit
A telecom expense audit is a process of reviewing all your contracts, billing records, inventories, and tariffs. This can reveal a plethora of hidden costs and inefficiencies in your telecom environment. This can either be conducted as a one-time audit or continuous auditing over time.
When you regularly conduct an audit across your telecom environment, you improve visibility and stop costs from growing unabated. It identifies anomalies on invoices, inconsistencies with your contracts, and ensures all discounts and rates are being honored.
If a TEM provider supports the audit process, they can find savings that your teams might not. This is because they have years of experience, vendor knowledge - and if they are globally capable - they aren't restricted by currency or language.
The benefits of a manual telecom audit:
- Supported by experts
- Years of experience
- Line-by-line auditing
2. Telecom Bill Audit Software
A telecom audit can be conducted manually, or with telecom bill audit software. Today, software underpins the majority of processes in enterprises. Many use it to automate the discovery of unnecessary telecom billing charges.
With telecom bill audit software, you can streamline data entry, processing, auditing, and reporting. The major benefit is that you don't require the hands-on support of an external organization, such as a TEM provider. Enterprises can run the software themselves. However, this can leave gaps in understanding over time that may require external support anyway.
The benefits of a software-enabled audit:
- Automated processes
- Real-time identification of errors
- One, centralized platform
Manual Telecom Audit or Telecom Bill Audit Software: The Best of Both?
A great TEM provider will combine manual auditing with telecom invoice audit software to enable you to achieve the best of both.
A team of experts audit your telecom billing line-by-line. Then software-enabled automated processes obtain an accurate, objective view of your telecom invoices. This near-eliminates room for error too.
Telecom costs can be accurately charged, processes are automated, and your teams and/or TEM provider can approve changes from one place. This can be managed within a telecom invoice and management processing platform that provides complete visibility of all your billing processes, making sure they are truly tamed.
