Telecommunications
Call for savings
Auditing your phone bills can uncover past mistakes
By Todd Shryock
Smart Business Cleveland | April 2002
The phone bill seems like an innocuous document that arrives at your business every month.
But sometimes hidden in the minutes used, taxes and special fees are mistakes the phone company made that are costing your business money.
"We find that in nearly all cases businesses can save 10 to 40 percent just on a monthly basis," says Brad Clark, president of SpyGlass Technology Advisors, a telecom and technology consulting firm. "It's money they've overpaid over the term of the contract."
SpyGlass performs the audits on a contingency basis, and collects only if they find errors.
"It allows a customer for no money at all to give us a couple of years of telephone bills for voice, data and Internet services and run an audit," says Clark. "We compare the bills with the tariff rate of the phone company. We make sure the business was billed properly and make sure they haven't been charged fees for services they don't have."
So how do the mistakes happen in the first place? Most of it stems from the complexity of the telecom laws.
"Telephone tariffs are incredibly complex animals," says Clark. "Generally, a tariff that a customer signs up for services under is rarely what actually gets billed to the client. It's not malicious on the part of the phone companies, just human error."
Each telephone line and service has a particular code that is assigned to it. If the code is entered wrong or is just never communicated to the right people within the phone company, then the billing is wrong. Discounts don't get applied properly if at all, and maybe installation fees that were supposed to be waived are added to the bill.
"Even when you have a full staff of accounts payable people, few are trained on telephone tariffs," says Clark. "When the bill comes in, it's often given to the IT department, but those folks aren't trained to make sure the tariff is correct. So the bill gets blindly approved and paid."
An audit makes the most sense for companies spending $2,500 or more per month on all telecom services, including Internet access. SpyGlass typically collects about half of any overcharges that would be refunded by the phone company.
