Audit phone bills

Once you have gathered all the records, you will have a mountain of paperwork in front of you. Now you are ready to audit. It works well to keep the phone bills organized by location or according to service: local, long distance, data, or wireless. Before doing a detailed line-by-line audit (which most people never have time for) do a cursory review of the bills. Take a common sense approach and look at the bills one by one. Try to get an idea of where your organization spends most of your telecom dollars. Then you will be ready to start auditing each bill.

First read the summary pages of each bill and see exactly what the carrier is charging you for. Does your organization really need all of these services? Do the charges seem correct? Are the taxes and fees excessive? Next, spot-check the call detail to get a ballpark idea of the cost per minute. When you encounter a charge that you do not understand, call the phone company and question it about the charge. Most phone company employees will patiently explain the phone bill to you, and many will offer suggestions on how to reduce the bill. You can also get end users involved. Your employees who are actually using the phones can be a valuable source of information. Ask them if they have any ideas on how to reduce the cost of your telecom services.

Monthly savings
The desired result of a telecom audit is to reduce monthly expenses by doing one or more of the following:

- Correct erroneous rates, such as wrong per-minute rates on a longdistance bill.

-Close unused accounts, such as local phone lines that are no longer used.

- Eliminate employee expenses, such as a mobile phone expenses for ex-employees.

- Eliminate unnecessary services, such as pager replacement programs and wire maintenance plans on local lines.

- Add missing discounts back to accounts and secure refunds of the overcharges, such as a missing association discount on a long-distance bill.

- Eliminate excessive fees by having the carrier waive them, such as monthly fees for 800 numbers on a long-distance bill.

- Add missing promotions back to accounts, such as missing waived local loop charges on a dedicated private line.

- Negotiate new promotions, such as free nights and weekends on a mobile phone.

- Implement lower pricing on an existing service, such as by changing rate plans on a mobile phone.

- Change to a more cost-effective service, such as replacing cellular phones with personal communication service (PCS) phones.

- Negotiate a new contract with your current carrier.

- Change vendors, for example, move intraLATA calls from the local carrier to the long-distance carrier.