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Tem Audit: What's In It?
Telecom Business Review | Tuesday, August 10, 2021
A TEM audit is the root of any advantage a TEM provider can offer.
FREMONT, CA: Telecom Expense Management (TEM) promises to support you save money on your technology contracts. TEM providers will assert that on top of saving you money, they can help you make money using more efficient technology investment.
They are big promises, and if you have a healthy level of scepticism, you'll wonder how. TEM is an excellent service and covers a lot, but a comprehensive TEM audit is the root of any advantage a TEM provider can offer. Let's look at what this audit includes and see how it aids your bottom line.
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THE SERVICE AUDIT
A standard starting place with TEM is to perform a service audit. This goes over your telecom services. It will inspect invoices and billing. It collates the costs of services with the benefits they give. It should be capable of estimating ROI on your service spending, and it's the key to the contract negotiation you require from your TEM services after the audits are done.
Thoroughly, service audits are comprehensive. They cover a conversion process. Here all invoices and bills are transformed into dollar amounts for processing. Conversion produces raw numbers that can be used in several analytical techniques and will let you see the exact spending and cost values.
The service audits will also play an inspection process. This is where the bills are evaluated for validity. Inspection finds reiterative services, excessive or unused services, billing and sometimes, outright fraud. Assessment is crucial to ensure that the numbers you see from the conversion accurately represent your TEM spending.
The third common piece of a service audit is dispute management. This is separate from the re-negotiation that you'll want when the audits conclude. Dispute management instantly addresses clear billing errors that are found during the audit. This is as much to ensure the audit is accurate as it saves you money in the case of egregious problems.
INVOICE AUDITS
Invoice audits work as the backbone of the audit process. This is where your invoice data is contrasted to inventory and contract data. The main purpose is to identify discrepancies and in-house accounting errors.
The invoice audits don't just emphasize problems. They dig deep into the mechanics of an issue. You shouldn't just see a spreadsheet showing where your number differs from another source. These audits identify how those discrepancies came to be. From there, it's a mere process to systematically eliminate sources of error.
Moreover, the invoice audits will analyze the cost of the errors they find. This can come in the shape of ongoing validation and resolution audits.
HISTORICAL AUDITS
Historical audits may be incorporated into service and invoices audits. What matters is that they are performed. These audits look over billing and invoicing history to find persistent overbilling problems. Overbilling can come in discrepant payments or a simple payment process for things you don't need.
The point of historical audits is to look through time to find recurring problems and costs thoroughly. While the other audits may discover one-time problems worthy of attention, the historical audits zero in on systemic issues.
The audit service can also include the resolution of historical problems. If a clerical error has generated you to pay more than is specified in a contract, you can look to retrieve some or all of that difference.
Briefly, audits are the first step to productive TEM. You must know what you are spending, how you're spending it and why. When responding to those questions, you can use analytical resources to find means to decrease spending and increase returns. Still, those objectives will never stand a chance unless you start by acquiring audit data.
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