Why TEM & Call Accounting Go Together
September 01, 2015
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
The role telecommunications plays in business success is significant. The cost to support telecommunications tools to achieve business goals can be described much the same way. For many an enterprise, it makes sense to collaborate with a Telecom Expense Management (TEM) provider to complete audits of telecommunications invoices. But if call accounting isn’t part of the mix, the audit won’t be completely accurate.
A recent NetworkWorld report highlighted the vast variety of mistakes that can occur when TEM is the only tool in your arsenal. For instance, one of the primary areas missed in TEM audits is identifying duplicate billing for circuits under two separate accounts. The problem can occur easily when local and global billing is involved and a review of the invoices may include a consolidated invoice. Circuit IDs are not always included in invoice details, which can allow for duplication to go undetected.
Dangling services can also drive up costs unnecessarily. When a company issues a disconnect order for an entire circuit, but not all parts of a service that are needed for full operation are included in the invoice, the organization may still continue to pay for parts of the service they no longer need or use. A similar situation can occur when duplicate access billing is a problem. Companies may use their own access rather than dedicated carrier access, yet the provider is still charging for the latter.
It’s also not uncommon for providers to fail to implement new rates under existing contracts or recent amendments. While TEMs do tend to look for this specifically, a failure to document things properly can leave them in the dark and the client paying too much for negotiated contracts. Call accounting would catch this right away as the agreed upon price would have been entered into the system before the first bill arrived.
Regardless of the size of the organization and the number of telecom services needed, it can be a complex mess to try and determine accurate costs, services and support over the long-term. TEM does a great job in identifying the glaring errors in an audit, but call accounting is a necessity to ensure the day-to-day charges are what they should be. Plus, a properly configured solution also assigns telecom costs appropriately to different departments so that budget and cost decisions made going forward are based on real-time data.
The point is, don’t get swept into the promise of TEM audits if you don’t have call accounting in place. A blend of the two will ensure you’re spending matches your telecom deployment so you can get back to focusing on running the business.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi