How Well do you Pay Attention to your Monthly Telecom Bills?
Typically in most organizations, telecom expenses fly under the radar though they often ranks in upper section of monthly corporate expenses. Use Telecom management fell to a telecom manager within the company but it has made a drastic swing into the IT department
"We let IT be IT." This is a relatively new term to describe our audit processes as administrative grunt work augmenting IT's normal tasks, which is generally related to managing the corporate IT infrastructure.
The main reason for this is that accounts payable must rely on the IT and/or telecom departments to tell them if those expenses are valid. Accounts Payable clerks generally do not understand the ins and outs of telecom bills. As we all know, if the invoices are similar in total dollar amounts to the prior month, they are just simply passed through the finance process for payment, with no further thought given to their validity.
IT's main role in corporate life is to keep everything running smoothly and plan for upcoming/impending applications and events. If they fail to keep their servers and applications functional 24/7, it recieves immediate attention that no one wants. If they fail to investigate a billing matter, it's possible that no one would know about it... but more importantly, IT is even less likely to understand the bill than an Accounts Payable clerk with a finance background. Administrative paperwork is not something IT professionals like to do and with telecom expenses it's a dramatic, time-consuming task. The amount of paper, items, cryptic descriptions, hidden charges and the multitudes of carrier contact necessary to resolve any billing matter is a lot for anyone to handle.
So what should you do? Invest in a company that will uncover this deluge and attempt to make sense of it so that by the time they're done, your business can go from having administrative paperwork grunt workers to decision makers, which is guaranteed to improve the organization's bottom line and all around efficiency.
Jeff Rothell, COO
Unified360