Please stop the madness! There are straightforward methods to decrease telecom expenses and increase visibility to cost and best of all, they work. In my opinion, these are the top five ways to decrease telecom expenses:

1: Consolidate billing: Consider the fact that invoices rarely come to one centralized location. How can you accurately determine the total expenses with each vendor? Also, a single telecom carrier may have 10+ billing platforms and you’ve got multiple vendors providing services across your enterprise. Yikes. Let’s not even get into late payment penalties. It’s simple: consolidate your invoices and insist that each carrier provide billing in an electronic format.

2: Validate invoices monthly: This absolutely needs to be automated! The time and resources it takes to manually validate thousands of line items for each bill is undoable for most organizations. Rely on a TEM solution to automatically validate against telecom inventory and contracts every single month. Be proactive because your telecom carriers will not do this for you.

3: Regularly reconcile telecom inventory with billing: Your network is constantly in flux. This means you must compare MACD (Move, Add, Change, Delete) information with invoices on a regular basis. Save significantly by making sure all circuits are being billed properly, disconnects are removed from billing, and you’re not paying for non-working circuits.

4: Allocate costs accurately: Use a Call Accounting solution to help identify where voice and data dollars are spent.  You’ll simplify the budgeting process, increase managers’ awareness of their departments’ spending, track how individuals impact the budget, and increase P&L visibility. This level of accountability will cause spending to drop.

5: Provide managers with reporting to understand what’s driving expenses: Reporting pulls everything together.  It provides managers with detailed explanations of expenses, improves vendor management, and promotes accountability among employees. Reporting will also help demonstrate compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley mandates.

Briefly, I will acknowledge that an employee-liable approach does provide more freedom, flexibility, and control to employees. If this is a big thing for your organization, then by all means, honor your culture. But from my perspective, the benefits of a corporate-liable mobility policy are deeper and have a greater impact on the health of your business.

Benefits of a corporate-liable approach include:

• Centralized management: Be more efficient by centrally controlling inventory, using only standardized devices, automating ordering, etc.
• Better business discounts and plans: See larger volume discounts and often, receive waivers for equipment replacement charges.
• Business-grade support from carriers: Leverage volume purchases to establish service level agreements.
• Lower cost through shared plans: Keep costs under control by pooling individuals on corporate contracts and having most users on “free” network calling.
• Less management time required from employees: Eliminate the time employees would spend managing their wireless plan, paying bills, and submitting expense reports while on the job.
• No expense reports to submit and process: Save your accounting team the time and headaches of reconciling individual expense reports with corporate policies to reimburse wireless expenses.
• Security and compliance control: Enable visibility and archiving of user activity, and enforce security and compliance policies by locking features, blocking websites, etc.

It goes without saying, but we’re more than happy to discuss your mobile policies with you on an individual basis. I look forward to your comments/feedback!