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Telecom Billing

By SPENCER D. CHIN TMCnet Web Editor

Telecom billing is a crucial function in any organization, whether it is a small or medium-sized company, or a large conglomerate. The critical role of a communications infrastructure in today's companies means that implementing a telecom billing management system that effectively tracks costs and expenses will ensure minimal errors, automate processes and better help the organization realize its financial goals.

Telecom billing now goes well beyond looking at a few pages of billing invoices to find discrepancies. In a larger enterprise, there could be scores of call records to scour through to find telecom billing errors. And telecom billing is not just looking at the costs of each call; surcharges imposed by either the company or regulatory agencies, taxes, and other charges make it imperative that companies adopt efficient telecom billing practices.

The greater complexity of telecom billing has led the telecom industry to adopt the term telecom expense management to denote the methodologies organizations use to manage telecom billing, taking into account the technologies, processes, policy, and people needed. The idea is to create processes that effectively deploy a company's existing resources so telecom billing can be accomplished smoothly and efficiently at all levels, as well as control expenses to help the organization reap a greater return on their investment in technology and human resources.

Setting up an efficient telecom expense management system to improve the accuracy of telecom billing practices is even more crucial when one considers the diversity and complexity of communications systems in companies today. It goes well beyond the office phone system using traditional wires. Nowadays, telecom billing could also include cell phones and other mobile devices such as Blackberries. In addition, there's telecom billing for a company's home-based workers submitting invoices from their phone service providers.

Automation is crucial. An efficient telecom expense management system will help ensure telecom billing is both accurate and timely-a challenge as bills oftentimes still arrive in a paper format. Although efforts are being made to streamline electronic billing through the electronic data interchange (EDI) standard, the rapid development of new communications technologies have EDI difficult to implement.

Properly implemented, a telecom expense management system will take a proactive approach to telecom billing, not only resolving errors but also predicting future network costs, implementing a realistic telecom budget, and centralizing all telecom data for data reporting and analysis.

All these capabilities will make future telecom billing more predictable and make for more efficient allocation of company monies and resources.

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Spencer Chin is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.