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How do you explain $253K to your Board of Directors?

     

     

    How do you explain $253K to your Board of Directors?

     

    You now owe $253K!

    Did you budget for the invoice that you will be getting from your Telecom Expense Management (TEM) Wireless Expense Management (WEM) or Utility Expense Management (UEM) partner?   The sweet sound of “you pay nothing unless we find something” can ring sour when your telecom or utility vendor overbills you and your TEM, WEM or UEM partner identifies the error.

    Identifying errors, obtaining refunds and identifying ways to save money, i.e. Cost Avoided, should be job one for your Expense Management partner.  However, if you have a partner that charges you based on savings or errors that they identify on a monthly basis, the bill you receive from them could be staggering.

    Case in point.

    RadiusPoint© has a Client that had an overbilling issue on their wireless invoice for data charges that were billing outside the contract rate.  ExpenseLogic™, RadiusPoint’s proprietary software identified the error the very first month that it billed, through the line item detail audit that occurs on each invoice.    This line item detail immediately identified the error for the data fee that was over the contract limit for over 3,000 wireless phone numbers.  The RadiusPoint Team immediately sent the report to the vendor detailing, by wireless phone number, the overage and requested a correction and a refund all while putting the overage amount into dispute with the vendor.

    The first month the error totaled over $120,000.00 which would have caused an invoice to be sent by your Wireless Expense Management partner out to your Accounts payable in the amount of $48,000.00 if you had some of the normal shared savings arrangements to share 40% of anything that is uncovered.  You may even have a tack on to whatever is found that you share in any realized savings for a specific amount of time, ongoing.  Yikes!  Where will it end?

    So how do you budget for something that you don’t know is going to occur?   The telecom and wireless vendors regularly overbill on their invoices and this can happen in one area or type of service and the following month an error can appear on a completely different type of service and invoice.  According to Gartner, in the article titled Historical Telecom Audit Is still a Valuable Function, “Carrier invoices are not accurate and will become even more inaccurate with the continued consolidation of carrier billing systems. Enterprises that do not possess the skilled staff to audit telecom invoices are overpaying and must recover those payments.”

    How do you ensure that your invoices are being audited on a monthly basis to recover any errors that are being billed?  Hiring a TEM, WEM or UEM partner that audits at the line item level by phone number of meter number will ensure that you will get the most detailed audit to uncover errors the first month that they appear on the invoice.  Ensuring that your partner is working on a flat fee basis to process each invoice and audit by line item detail during this processing and allocation of the invoice will make more sense not if, but when your vendors overcharge.

    No Hidden or Surprise Fees!

    For RadiusPoint’s Client, there was no scary large invoice that had to be paid.  Had the Client utilized a partner that shared in the savings, they could have been sent a bill that exceeded $253K for the ongoing errors that the wireless vendor continued to bill. Since we charge based on a flat fee basis, our clients never have to worry about surprise or hidden fees. RadiusPoint continued to audit each month and at month four, the overcharge from the vendor exceeded $634,000.00.  The Client didn’t even have to pay these fees and wait on the return of the money from their vendor.  RadiusPoint put the amount into dispute each month, ensuring that services would not be affected.

    RadiusPoint provides the auditing services on a monthly basis while processing each invoice and allocating all expenses down to the phone number or meter number level.  Ensuring that are Clients are billed correctly is a strong focus of the RadiusPoint Team and utilizing ExpenseLogic for the audit enables our Client’s invoices to be processed, allocated, audited and paid on time each month.

     

    To learn more about The RadiusPoint Solution, visit our website or contact one of our representatives today.

     

     

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