How to Perfect Your Telecom Audit Process

A Telecom audit is an important process for any organization. Human error, failure to pay close attention to details, constraint of time in checking long telecom bills, and insufficient knowledge of new technology and regulations - these mistakes can take a toll on the revenue of a company. Avoiding all these potential problems is an integral part of the expense management of an organization. Many small losses can add up to a huge amount. In order to curb this waste, organizations can either use an automated telecom audit tool, a Telecom Management professional, or a combination of the two.

Telecom audit is a process that helps to detect and reveal even the smallest errors that waste money. Thus, it provides an opportunity not only to recover lost revenue, but also ensures that errors are not repeated.

Telecom audit ideally has three stages:

Acquiring Documents to Create an Inventory Database

The first stage involves the collection of telecom invoices. These invoices show the costs over time and the customer records. Telecom audit companies at times use software in this stage that both acts as a database and helps in analyzing trends.

Depending on the size of your company, just collecting these invoices could be a very time-consuming job. Start with the local phone bills and work outward. The long distance bills may be on the same invoice or billed separately. Wireless services can be billed as a group or individual accounts. Check to see if each bill matches with a known phone. For Internet service bills, they may be on a separate bill or, if the local provider offers broadband with local service, they may be with the local phone invoice.

The next thing to collect is voice and data service contracts. These include local and long distance service, wireless phones, telecom equipment and any maintenance service agreements.

Make the time to request your Customer Service Records (CSRs) from your provider. Your providers may take a few weeks to get to your requests, but it's worth the wait. These records contain your unique data that will ultimately be the foundation of your telecom audit. They are written in Universal Service Order Codes (USOC) and they are an itemized listing of all your lines, services, and features.

You should also gather any agreements for Directory Advertising or Yellow Pages. If your company is large, sometimes a publicity or advertising department handles these agreements. The documents are important because they will specify the rates that apply to all advertising, when it was ordered and by whom.

Other documents to get access to are tariffs. Tariffs are the provider's official documents that break down all the rules, service offers, rates, etc. that they offer. You can find these rules on your provider's website. Also gather any tax information that applies to your company. Charities, schools, churches, and some nonprofit organizations may be exempt from state and/or federal taxes.

Analyzing All the Data

The second stage of audit involves the comparison of inventory costs against pricing plans. And the first thing required is an inventory audit. In this section, you look at your organization's inventory of telecom assets. Instead of looking for spot errors, this kind of telecom audit looks for trend information. This data aids the company in deciding whether it needs to expand its telecom resources or to re-deploy its existing resources.

Now a comparison of cost against pricing plans can be made. Here's where a telecom audit firm can be very helpful. They keep a record of current pricing and tariff changes. With the help of these records and databases, the audit firms can provide a cost effective plan for their clients.

Reporting and Recommendations

The third and crucial stage involves reports and recommendations. If you are doing this audit yourself, after looking at all the data, this is where you decide where you might be able to save money. A telecom audit firm will also give you their reports and recommendations at this time. Along with the presentation of their reports and analysis, they also give their suggestions for improvements and savings that have been identified in the process.

They may find errors in you bills and suggest disputing some charges. They may find credits you never received and apply for refunds for you. Today's telecom bills contain many errors that you won't find unless you do an audit.

Since billing errors play havoc on draining the organization's capital, partnering with companies that provide solutions to check such errors is becoming increasingly popular. When using a telecom-auditing firm, there are two ways to approach it. One of them is the "contingency" method, where the telecom audit firms receive a percentage of the money they saved clients. The second can be a "fixed fee" approach. Generally, small and medium firms go for the contingency process, whereas large firms go for the second approach, as it is easier to manage.

No matter which approach a firm takes, one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that telecom audits should be conducted by both big and small businesses to keep a check on their expenses. The telecom audit process is complex and time-consuming, but fortunately, there are companies that provide such services, and instituting a regular telecom audit can ensure cost optimization for any firm, and almost surely improve its bottom line.

With more than twenty years of experience in planning, implementing, managing and consulting on telecommunications projects, Nermine Shaker has generated millions of dollars worth of savings for her clients. She is a Partner at The Sygnal Group, a Telecommunications Management Company that offers unbiased reporting, analysis and implementation of telecom strategies to businesses of all sizes. http://www.SygnalGroup.com

Residential Telecom Audits

No business can flourish without an efficient and advanced telecommunications infrastructure in its offices and factories. All employees need a communication device to maintain their efficiency and save precious time. Obviously it means the establishment of an extensive telecom network in your offices. A big chunk of your budget has to be allocated for the successful operation and optimum utilization of telecom resources. You need to maintain a separate department to oversee the functioning of the telecom network and its finances.

This means that you can employ a team of expert auditors to keep an eye on the billing of the telephone vendors, in-house misuse or fraud in utilizing the network devices, and regular contact with the vendors with timely references to the anomalies in their billing. And in case the overcharged bills have been paid, they will have to be recovered or credited into your account. Your in-house team needs to do a detailed planning of your telecom network and make important and timely decisions about the budgetary allocations to implement the plans. Besides auditing the billing and other financial aspects, your auditors can also use the software to automatically audit and validate the invoices.

You must also note that managing a telecom network is a very complex and confusing affair because the data comes from a variety of sources, such as contracts, invoices, vendors and customer services. The software can easily analyze this data, which is a daunting task for your residential auditors and can encroach upon their time, which can be more usefully spent on other important aspects. The software can therefore reduce the time-consuming manual processes and increase efficiency. It can also display and track unresolved billing errors.

Despite the detailed and comprehensively programmed software that you may be using, it cannot resolve unexpected billing problems. It is here your Residential Telecom Audit Team can step in. It can ensure that your company is getting the optimum services from your telecom infrastructure and network. It should help to rein in the uncontrollable costs, besides replacing the outdated telecom devices by getting the latest ones and including the latest technologies to optimize the returns on investments. In this way your Residential Audits team can organize the entire telecom environment to promote the growth of your organization.

Telecom Audits provides detailed information about telecom audits, telecom bill audits, telecom audit software, telecom bill management audits and more. Telecom Audits is the sister site of Internet Merchant Services.

Telecom Audit to Get Refund

If your company has been in operation for two or more years, then it is time to have a telephone bill audit done by a professional consultant who is knowledgeable on the billing methods of the telephone industry. An audit will uncover service and billing issue that aren't always apparent when paying the monthly phone bill. Having this done early on enables your company being reimbursed quickly if there are errors on the telephone bills. These over looked billing errors can add up quickly, costing a company thousands of dollars. The company I work with found out because of other issues that they had been overcharged for years on lines that were not being used any longer, taxes, and long distance rates. The longer the time frame the more difficult it can be to have the phone company see their errors and getting them to pay the overages.

Many business change telecom vendors regularly in hopes of a saving, when they should be auditing their telecommunications services and systems to identify billing errors and opportunities to reduce costs while maintaining or improving service. If you do decide to change carriers it is a good idea to have an audit done first because you may be eligible for a refund from your current provider, but you may forfeit any reimbursements if you would cancel their service and go with a competitor.

Why should you use a trained Auditor? Well, I'm auditing a company's telephone bill that last year swapped out an old PBX phone system for a Cisco Call Manager. To do this complete switch over all of the new services had to be installed by their Telecom provider, which meant the company switched from analog lines to a PRI T1. Not until after doing the telephone audit did the company find out that it had been paying for service that it had requested terminated for a year. The company was able to recoup thousands of dollars from the provider. Most companies accounting personal don't have the knowledge or training to determine if accurately applied Federal, State and Local surcharges and taxes have been billed, thereby reducing your possible refunds.

Another point in favor of reviewing your company's telephone service is performing a traffic study to see if you have the right number of lines and circuits to properly handle inbound and outbound calls. Foolishly some company's method of doing a traffic study is to do nothing about their current number of lines until customers start complaining and there is nothing worse than not being able to get thru to a company most people if they can't get thru will go to a vendor with enough lines providing a good customer service. But on the other hand, margins are down and paying for unnecessary lines is not the answer either, a traffic study pays for its self.

There are many payment options available when employing a Telecom consultant to do an audit. They can either be paid by the hour, a set fee or the Consultant may opt to take a percentage of the refund.

Anything that makes your company give better customer service, profits high, and a little money saved it worth spending the money on a telephone audit.

Mike Stephens is president of Net Services Inc a structured cabling company in St. Louis Mo. To find out more about cabling for voice data and video see http://www.netservices1.com