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The Telecom Audit is Vital

By STEFANIA VISCUSI TMCnet Assistant Editor for Channels

In the practice of managing telecom expenditures, it becomes necessary to create a baseline of telecom assets and protocols for identifying areas where either errors in billing have been made and, or, there is a better, more cost sensible plan that can be utilized in place of what may not currently be working.

These and other methods of identifying working telecom assets uncover exactly where all the billing losses are occurring and are called the Telecom Audit.

The telecom audit has multiple components. Most organizations traditionally view the first component of a telecom audit as combing through past invoices and verifying telecom contract information against the rates they've been paying to see if they are accurate.

Managing assets through an inventory audit is the second component. This part of the telecom audit creates a validated baseline inventory of telecommunications assets and resources. Both telecom audit components are critical to a holistic telecom expense management solution.

The telecom audit is particularly vital in the telecom expense management process as it offers not only improvements in spending but also helps in telecom cost reduction.

A telecom audit is important because it conducts a detailed examination of the vendor invoices, looking for errors that cannot be found by a simple, quick scan of the invoice. Uncovering these areas of loss and looking to a strategic way of fixing those losses help clients get back money and reduce their expenses so they can be applied more effectively, elsewhere.

Creating a baseline inventory for a telecom audit is critical. The baseline generally includes but is not limited to, identifying circuit identifiers, locations, rate elements, and other critical data elements required to support the invoice audit, contract benchmarking, network optimization, and other analysis.

The telecom audit process takes away the level of complexity of managing telecom expenses and changes it so that it is easy to see a break down of assets and telecom spend.

The telecom audit process is used to find areas needing improvement and uncover those hard to find errors that have taken the drain on capital in the past.

Simply spot-checking a few bills here and there is not going to help. There needs to be a thorough investigation to help find money that has been lost. Short-term fixes don't offer a guaranteed continued savings and stopping the flow of additional money loss just because of billing errors.

AnchorPoint offers telecom audit and recovery services that help enterprises identify areas of savings. These telecom audit initiatives include building a baseline of all communications assets, reviewing invoices in detail to find every savings opportunity possible against existing assets and contracts and recovery services that assist in recovering funds that may have been lost due to error. In addition, AnchorPoint automated TEM solutions can also be leveraged post telecom audit-- providing the necessary tools to ensure billing errors do not creep back in once a telecom audit has occurred.

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Stefania Viscusi is an established writer and avid reader. To see more of her articles, please visit Stefania Viscusi's columnist page.