7.9.09

Telecom invoice management- catch costly errors

Telecom Invoice Management - Catch Costly Errors by Creative Assistant

Large corporations are not surprised when their telecom invoice management department receives 1,000 to 2,000 invoices per month from their telecom service providers. Some of the invoices can easily include more than 100 pages. Large companies can spend over 200 million a year on telephone services. Unfortunately, some companies loose out every month on lowering their telephone expenses by not having telecom invoice management software.

Most auditors that manually perform spot checks on telephone service invoices claim they are only helping the company capture a small percentage of the savings that are available from catching telecom billing errors. Companies are routinely being overcharged and paying for phone lines or cell phones usage that the company terminated.

Businesses can simply hire more staff to review the telecom invoices but telecom invoice management software is much more efficient than humans at reviewing each invoice. The software generally has a short payback time period and provides significant savings for large, medium and even some small companies.

An auditor from one large corporation claimed his staff was catching invoice errors that ended up saving the corporation about 1 to 2 percent per year. However, the auditing staff believed that about five percent of the invoices included errors and a large amount of money had been wasted.

An effective invoice management software package will check all the telecom invoices for errors, not just periodic samples which typically occur with auditors. Large companies easily spend more than 100 million on telecom services annually and average size companies in telecom communication heavy usage industries often spend more than 25 million per year. The savings gained by utilizing telecom invoice management software is substantial.

Companies that don’t have effective centralized management structure and telecom expense management software have a difficult time checking each invoice for errors due to the huge volume and the complexity that characterizes most telecom service providers invoices. Most experts claim that the typical invoice contains 7% to 12% of charges that are mistakes. Some telecom expense management experts suggest that 10% to 20 % of telephone charges are errors.

Unfortunately for companies, more than 80% of the errors go in favor of the telephone service companies and this disproportionate outcome doesn't look it's going to change. More and more companies are relying on telecom invoice management software instead of waiting for the telephone service providers to eliminate the mistakes or for half of the mistakes to go in their favor.

An effective telecom expense management system combines all the telephone providers' tariffs and contract information into one database. Since a contract with a prominent telephone carrier can include over 2,000 rate categories, software is essential to catch all the errors. Without telecom invoice management software, companies are simply giving huge sums of money to telephone companies which they don't deserve.

For more information on telecom expense management visit the Telsoft Solutions website at www.telsoft-solutions.com.

Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_623451_15.html

1 comment:

  1. Nice article. I wanted to augment your comments by mentioning that a litany of companies are using telecom audits to streamline the expense management process. I can speak most directly here to wireless costs since the company I work for, Validas, electronically audits and subsequently reduces the average cell bill by 22 percent through our website, http://www.fixmycellbill.com . Put simply, Validas guards against frivolous and unnecessary charges that inflate a company's total cell bill. You can find out for free if fixmycellbill.com can modify your personal or corporate wireless plan to better suit your needs by going to the website.

    For more info, check out Validas in the national news media, most recently on Fox News at: http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/dpp/consumer/conlaw/lower_cell_phone_bills_072409 .

    Best,

    Dylan
    Consumer Marketing Manager, fixmycellbill.com

    ReplyDelete