How Do You Drive Telecom Expense Management?
October 01, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
When was the last time you reviewed your telecom expenses and compared them against your actual usage? A number of organizations skip this step, trusting that their contracts are in order and simplifying the process by just paying the bills. In doing so, however, they could be missing out on the opportunity to correct errors and avoid overpayments. The savings from these two areas alone are reason to consider telecom expense management.
A recent post in the CPA Practice Advisor highlighted the expansion of features included in Certify. The enhancements are designed to enable executives and accountants to analyze telecom spending more efficiently while also streamlining the process for employees. New features include a dashboard with a rich set of graphs, charts and gauges that deliver a visual representation of key metrics over the previous 90 days. Users can click each element to drill down into more detail to better support telecom expense management initiatives.
The Certify Mobile app has also been enhanced to enable SAML specification to support single sign-on. Certify customers can now use single sign-on credentials to access the mobile app, while large enterprises can streamline deployment of the app throughout the employee base using the Certify dashboard. Customer requests served as the inspiration for the enhancements to the dashboard, ensuring capabilities get right to the heart of information decision makers want to access in order to better manage telecom usage and spend.
One of the primary goals for telecom expense management is to enable a clear understanding of employee spending trends, potential cost savings and even opportunities to optimize budgets. With the single sign-on enabled through the mobile app, end users not only gain access to more convenience; the enterprise can also better manage all users through the central management of passwords. IT and security administrators can better manage the environment according to internal security policies, while also meeting user demands.
One Certify client noted that the application enhances controls and documentation over expense management. The cloud-based deployment makes it easy to get started and little up-front costs means the platform is in-line with telecom expense management initiatives to stay within budget, while also extending capabilities to the entire user base. Plus, integration with other key enterprise applications streamlines accountability and ensures companies only pay for what they need and use.
It’s easy to overlook telecom expenses and the possibility of errors or mismanaged contracts. The introduction of mobility for the employee base created a whole new layer of information management, putting more pressure on the executive team to stay informed. Without the right tools, however, the time involved could quickly negate the money saved.