Cancelled orders? Tax exemptions? Third-party services? Your company is making costly telecom billing mistakes each month. With Validated Telecom Billing® services, you can improve your bottom line.
Your IT budget doesn’t have any room for errors. But when it comes to telecom/datacom bills — you’re probably paying too much. Industry-wide, almost 80% of all telecom bills are incorrect and riddled with charges you simply shouldn’t pay for.
Here are the top five telecom billing mistakes your hard-working employees don’t have the time, resources or expertise to uncover each month.
- Continued Billing for Disconnected Services/Equipment: Cancelled orders, disconnected lines and returned equipment that is continually billed after the committed stop-billing date. This can occur for months and even years.
- Incorrect Services/Third-Party Charges: Companies are often charged for services like long distance lines they don’t own. These fees also include third-party billings for services like online faxing, voicemail and internet security monitoring.
- Metering and Database Errors: Often these include local and long-distance charges, these may occur through transcription errors, metering malfunctions — including double metering — and charges for incomplete calls.
- Incorrect Rates/Contract Renewals: These discrepancies occur with newly installed services that don’t receive the quoted rate or discounts, and contract renewals that include lower rates never applied to monthly invoices.
- Tax Errors: Fees applied despite applicable statutes or ruling exemptions, and incorrect taxing jurisdictions. If facilities are taxed incorrectly, associated usage charges are often taxed incorrectly.
Telecom Expense Management
Beyond an initial telecom audit, the best way to ensure the department that manages your telecom expenses is not making the same mistakes each month is through Telecom Expense Management (TEM). At Ruby+Solberg, we use sophisticated software and offer more than 23 years of experience locating billing errors and overages. Our services and speciality lies in cleaning up your telecom asset database and making sure it remains clean, accurate and as lean as possible to enable month-to-month savings.
TEM is an extensive monthly outsourcing solution which manages small- to medium-sized business telecommunications billing. If you rely on Paychex or ADP to handle your payroll, you should use TEM to administer telecom/datacom fees — one of your businesses’ five largest expenses.
Ruby+Solberg’s monthly TEM analysis:
- Reviews telecom invoices, disputes charges and recovers funds
- Recommends ways to reduce telecom costs
- Negotiates contracts with carriers
- Resolves billing disputes with carriers
- Validates and approves all charges
- Optimizes rate plans for wireless users, including carrier plan adjustments
- Mitigates telecom expense creep — which averages a 3% increase annually
- Pays invoices
- Allocates costs to appropriate client accounting codes
- Offers online bill presentation through a secure website
- Provides online management reports
- Interfaces with your general ledger accounting systems
- Provides monthly reports and expense summaries — including a six month financial trend report
- Archives bills for at least three years
Our analysts work seamlessly with your IT telecom department, finance department, accounts payable and the company controller to save you time and money. Everyone’s got a job to do. Ours is to ensure you’re not overlooking the mistakes that affect the hard and soft costs that impact your business.
