As we discuss pain points of telecom and wireless management, this one will probably be most familiar to readers. Invoice auditing is a long time tactic for reducing telecom expenses. Even if you just do a cursory overview of your bills each month, you can often spot problems that can be corrected to save money. By hiring an outside consultant, or a firm like Valicom, you can get into deeper invoice audits thatinvolve pulling CSR (customer service records) from the various vendors, and verifying that services being billed for actually A) are in use and needed and B) are being charged at contract rates.
Through these deeper dive audits, you can often uncover a host of issues and areas for savings, which then leads to the challenge of credit recovery. There are different rules in different states for how far back you can request credit, and a follow-up audit needs to take place to ensure all those credits are applied. A follow-up audit can also confirm that any requested changes, like getting rates down to contractual levels or addition or deletion of services, are actually done properly, and billed accordingly.
You’d think it would be easy to have a telecom invoice come out clean, but industry stats have shown that up to 35% of telecom invoices have errors on them. That means room for a lot of improvement, and a lot of savings, which makes it one of our top pain points. One thing that has made telecom invoice auditing a lot easier in recent years is the advancement of web-based software tools to track invoices and inventory.