Reduce fixed-line communications costs through an ongoing telecom audit.
Nearly half of all organizations do not know their exact fixed-line telecommunications expense and even fewer perform invoice audits against their contracted rates. Invoices for fixed-line services are complex and lengthy, and contractual terms and conditions are often complicated. Manually auditing these invoices has become nearly impossible. This often results in invoices that are “rubber stamped,” and/or incur penalties due to late payment. Aberdeen estimates that 7 to 12 percent of all communications invoices are in error, and many businesses are leaving money on the table.
Advocate Networks fixed-line telecom expense management services deliver cost recovery through electronic audits against contracts and inventory, automated AP/GL remittance to reduce late payment penalties, and inventory accuracy checks via a centralized procurement hub. Combined, these services reduce fixed-line communications costs by an average of 10 to 20 percent within the first 12 months of service.
Invoice Audit and Management
The Advocate Networks technology driven invoice audit and management approach eliminates the inaccurate and time consuming manual audit, replacing it with a comprehensive, automated electronic audit. This increases identification of billing errors, resulting in greater reductions in telecom expense.
Invoice audit and management service from Advocate Networks includes a continuous monthly auditing of all electronic telecom invoices against contractual commitments (rates and terms), service inventory, spend and trend variances, utilization, and communication service configurations. Monthly audits include:
- Contract Audits – Our technology compares invoices to contract terms and conditions, providing alerts for both favorable and unfavorable conditions. Alerts for pending contract expirations are also provided.
- Rate Audits – This audit compares actual billing data to the corresponding contractual rates. Audits are conducted on each individual call detail record (CDR) as well as summary discounts and credits.
- Bill Audits – Bill audits check the integrity and accuracy of actual bills for increment and rounding errors, unknown usage charges, late payment fees, casual billing errors, expected prorated charges, and more.
- Inventory Audits – Advocate Networks software checks actual billing for unaccepted or unknown inventory, and erroneous charges for disconnected inventory.
- Trending Tests – These tests identify significant variances in total month-to-month bills and invoices, line cost variances, and working telephone number tests. The tests then compare the amount billed versus previously paid amounts.
As invoices are processed, Advocate Networks will ensure that AP remittance is provided in a timely manner to avoid late payment fees. All internal cost allocations (GL) are properly coded. By using fixed-line invoice audit and management from Advocate Networks, clients gain control of invoice processing while obtaining significant telecom expense reductions.
Provisioning and Inventory Management
Fixed-line provisioning can be complicated, depending on the circuit being installed. Circuit turn-ups need to be actively managed to reduce errors and ensure conformance to internal timelines. Extended provisioning timelines can result in lost business. Once installed, circuits and their configurations are often known solely in the minds of telecommunications technicians. This can result in “lost” circuit inventory over time.
When your company utilizes the Advocate Networks provisioning and inventory management service, our experienced project managers are assigned to your most complex installations – ensuring a task and timeline-driven provisioning approach. This greatly reduces the risk of errors and missed milestones, while reducing the time requirements on your internal staff. Once an installation is complete, inventory is logged in a central inventory database for invoice audit and management (link to above).
Advocate Networks will manage the provisioning process from request through turn-up to verification testing. We add active circuits to the central inventory database and log bill start dates on the front end, while executing circuit deactivation requests and bill end dates on the back end. Additionally, Advocate Networks provides weekly project status reports to all relevant stakeholders.
Utilizing fixed-line provisioning and inventory management from Advocate Networks, your company will benefit from reduced telecom costs while maintaining an accurate fixed-line inventory.
Analysis and Reporting
Information is the key to effective telecommunications management. By working with the Advocate Networks fixed-line managed services suite, your company will have access to a library of operational and business intelligence reports. Access to information can be controlled based on user-prescribed rules, allowing departmental managers to access departmental reports, and executives to view organization-wide reports. All reports can be exported to Excel, PDF, RTF, and RPT files. Fixed-line reports included in this service include:
- Audit Results
- Inventory by Location(s)
- Casual Billing
- Expense and Usage
- Account-Level Expense
- Monthly Expense by Products
- Carrier Expense Summaries
- Invoice Reports
- Allocation Reports
- Cost-Center Reports