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Manage Telecom Expense with a TEM Audit
Manage Telecom Expense with a TEM Audit
A common misconception is that TEM only relates to the area of telecom cost, when if fact it encompasses just about every communications service that a business expends its budget on. A lot of times the acronym WEM is used for managed wireless expense solutions, I have not seen NEM used as pertaining to TEM but sooner or later I believe that the techies will incorporate this into their vocabulary, I say this in all earnest because network expense management is a huge chunk of the Enterprise communications budget. I have never heard of any acronym that applies to the auditing of telecom expenses but only have heard it referred to as telecom invoice auditing, telecom bill review, landline and wireline auditing.
Now with that said lets get back to the subject matter, which is the freedom that a managed telecom expense software solution can bring to your accounting, IT and telecom staff. They are separate departments but the need of communicating with each other in regard to the communications budget is the key to obtaining a view into the leak of corporate unaccountable budgetary expenses.
Normally it is your IT staff or telecom manager that conducts an RFP for new hardware (VoIP, MPLS), that will support your companys growing Enterprise, the communication between your staff and the short list of providers is exact and the financial details are studied until someone finally makes a decision to pull the trigger and sign the telecommunications agreement.
After the endorsement, your staff now focuses on all the details of the deployment of the telecom hardware under the understanding that the services will be invoiced according to the negotiated pricing, because after all your integrity ensures that when your corporation enters into an agreement with a client you have multiple checks to ensure that you bill them according to the agreement.
Once the deployment starts all eyes are focused upon getting the hardware and software integrated so that the system performs according to the vision held by all. This is where it gets fuzzy because now you get the first invoices and you pull out your telecom contract to review the contracted rates to the actual telecom invoice. As you start to compare the invoices to the contracts you find out quickly that the terms used to define services in the contracts are not the same terms used on your invoice.
Case in point is that ATT local service invoices are expressed as monthly charges and the local telecom bill does not reflect the breakdown of the line item charges for the telecom service. Now you can either order a copy of your customer service record (CSR (News - Alert)), and try to analyze the Uniform Service Order Codes (USOC), which by the way can contain over 1000 codes for the same service item or you can accept the realization that you have a job to do and since all of this isn't making any sense you fall back on the your corporate philosophy that is based on the Integrity of billing according to contractual agreements and you decide that the extra $10,000 - $100,000 per month over the projected cost is probably due to all the surcharges, municipal fees and taxes associated with the price of doing business. This is an extra $120,000 to $1,200,000 a year that could be associated to your telecom budgetary leak.
Your accounting department will generally only conduct a telecom bill review in the months that trigger a red flag due to the sudden spike in the expense of a communications service. This is usually contained to the one telecom service provider who triggered the red flag and the rest of the invoices are left unexamined because they fall within the considered norm of a small monthly cost increase.
What I have found out to be true is that most billing errors that are discovered during a telecom invoice audit didn't just all of a sudden start billing at an incorrect rate but instead, the audit determines that the invoice error occurred at day one of provisioning of the telecom service. Most of the time the promotion code is incorrectly entered after the sales representative presents the telecom contract to their boss, who then submits it their counter part in the acceptance department, this department in turn submits it to the technical department and they in turn deliver it to provisioning who enters the promotion codes into the billing platform. Its kind of like that old childhood game where you sit in a large circle and whisper in the ear of the person next to you a statement and they in turn whisper the same statement to the person sitting next to them. We all know what happens when the course of this game has taken place and every laughs when the statement is announced out loud to be far from what the original statement was.
That is fine for kid games but when your dealing with a telecom invoice that amounts to millions of dollars a year it is not something to laugh about.
Telecom expense management software is able to reconcile each single line item charge with your telecom contracts and allow you to make the telecom service provider look else where to find excess growth to their revenue.
The basic point that I am trying to establish is that regardless of what the contractual agreements are, you need to hire someone to manage a telecom expense audit who is well established and due to their many years of experience in telecom audits they can understand the different uses of the USOC lists and apply that knowledge to the reconciliation to the telecom agreement.
The biggest challenge that you will encounter during your research for a managed telecom expense solution will be how to research and qualify the different telecom auditing software opportunities available. One advantage that you have, which did not exist a short time ago is TelecomExpenseManagement.Org; this site contains all the resources that you need to manage telecom expense. The TelecomExpenseManagement.Org site contains a comprehensive directory, broken down into tabs for issues such as telecom expense management, wireless expense management, network expense management, telecom invoice auditing, wireless help desk and wireless procurement; there are also additional tabs for retired asset donations, a TEM ROI assessment tool and information about conducting a TEM RFP. The site is unique in the fact that you will want to bookmark it and keep coming back each time you need to research an issue. They display headings and direct links to so many solutions, that you will not have to spend so much time trying to identify a company that can provide relief to the telecom budget leak that so many growing companies are experiencing in these troubled economic times. Each time you need to research an issue, you will find yourself coming back to TelecomExpenseManagement.Org time and time again!
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