What Is Covered in a TEM Audit?

Telecom Expense Management (TEM) promises to help you save money on your technology contracts. TEM providers will claim that on top of saving you money, they can help you make money through more efficient technology investment. They’re big promises, and if you have a healthy level of skepticism, you’ll wonder how. TEM is a big service, and it covers a lot, but at the root of any benefit a TEM provider can offer is a comprehensive TEM audit. Let’s look at what is included in this audit and see how it helps your bottom line.

The Service Audit

A standard starting place with TEM is to perform a service audit. This goes over your telecom services. It will scrutinize invoices and billing. It compares the costs of services to the benefits they provide. It should be able to estimate ROI on your service spending, and it’s the key to the contract negotiation you want from your TEM services after the audits are done.

In detail, service audits are comprehensive. They cover a conversion process. This is where all invoices and bills are converted into dollar amounts for processing. Conversion creates raw numbers that can be used in multiple analytical techniques and will let you see the exact spending and cost values.

The service audits will also perform an inspection process. This is where the bills are assessed for validity. Inspection finds duplicative services, excessive or unused services, over billing and sometimes, outright fraud. Inspection is crucial to ensure that the numbers you see from the conversion are an accurate representation of your TEM spending.

The third standard part of a service audit is dispute management. This is separate from re-negotiation that you’ll want when the audits conclude. Dispute management immediately addresses clear billing errors that are found during the audit. This is as much to make sure the audit is accurate as it is to save you money in the case of egregious problems.

Invoice Audits

Invoice audits serve as the backbone of the audit process. This is where your invoice data is compared to inventory and contract data. The primary purpose is to identify discrepancies and in-house accounting errors.

The invoice audits don’t just highlight problems. They delve deep into the mechanics of an issue. You shouldn’t just be seeing a spreadsheet that shows where your number differ from another source. These audits are identifying how those discrepancies came to be. From there, it’s a much easier process to systematically eliminate sources of error.

Additionally, the invoice audits will analyze the cost of the errors they find. This can come in the form of ongoing validation and resolution audits.

Historical Audits

Historical audits may be included in service and/or invoices audits. What really matters is that they are performed. These audits specifically look over the history of billing and invoicing to find persistent problems with overbilling. Overbilling can come in the form of discrepant payments, or it can be a simple process of paying for things you don’t need. The point of historical audits is to thoroughly look through time to find problems and costs that recur. While the other audits may find one-time problems that are worthy of attention, the historical audits zero in on systemic issues.

The audit service can also include resolution of historical problems. If a clerical error has caused you to pay more than is specified in a contract, you can look to recover some or all of that difference.

In short, audits are the first step to productive TEM. You have to know what your spending, how you’re spending it and why. When those questions are answered, you can use analytical resources to find ways to reduce spending and increase returns, but those goals will never stand a chance unless you start by acquiring audit data.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CHANTEL SOUMIS

Chantel Soumis brings over a decade of knowledge in workflow enhancement through the use of technology. Chantel studied marketing communications and business administration at Franklin University and proceeded to work in a fast, ambitious environment, assuring client delight in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Passionate about project productivity and streamlining workflows through the use of technology, Chantel strives to inform organizations of Valicom’s advanced telecom expense management software and services by mastering communications and messaging while delivering helpful information and supporting resources.