The workplace is always changing. Businesses are investing heavily in technology and mobile assets to keep up with the evolving working environment.
This means telecommunication expenses have become a significant element of running a business. As an accounting professional, you are responsible for the responsibility of monitoring all telecom-related expenses, but also delivering continuous process improvement and cost savings for the business.
Conducting a telecom expense audit will yield value, however, it comes with its own challenges. It’s a huge and often difficult process, however, when it is done right, it can aid in optimizing assets, evaluating expenses, and pinpoint areas that can be cut costs or increase efficiency.
In this article, we’ll review some of the issues and potential obstacles encountered when conducting a telecom expense audit, along with ways to overcome these challenges to maximize performance and ensure optimal telecom usage.
What is a Telecom Expense Audit?
A Telecom expense audit provides valuable visibility into your entire telecom environment. It’s a lot more extensive and intricate than simply looking over the items in your invoices for the month. The audit goes far beyond the phone bill and examines other costs related to your network equipment (and software) and usage actions.
Conduct a telecom expense audit: This procedure will assist in:
- Review ongoing expenses on assets and services
- Create an inventory and assets list
- Track assets under- or over-utilised
- Recognize areas of inefficiency and areas of overspending
- Consolidate services, resources, and billing services
- Recommend new technology to enhance the process.
Also read: What is Enterprise Compensation Management: Components, Features and Best Practices
Challenges of Auditing Telecom Expenses
A telecom expense audit provides many advantages to any organization; however, undertaking one may prove daunting for your finance team. The processes and work required to conduct the audit may be long, time-consuming, and require a significant amount of manual labor.
To make sure you don’t get these issues, we’ve identified the most significant issues you could face in the next audit of your telecom.
1. Lack of visibility
One of the major reasons for conducting the audits is to gain greater insight into your entire telecoms environment. However, based on the scale of your business, this system could be extremely complicated and confusing. It is essential to monitor every device, equipment, network connection, and fixed infrastructure. Additionally, you must manage the individual and departmental activities such as data usage, subscriptions to mobile or software apps.
It’s difficult to conduct a thorough audit when you’re not certain which assets are located and how they’re used, and who’s accountable for the assets. It requires long hours and lots of effort to track each telecom service or asset across all teams within your company.
The first telecom audit can often prove to be the most difficult experience. Once you’ve created an inventory and register of assets, it’s easy to conduct regular audits and remain in the loop of everything going on in your telecom environment.
2. Time-consuming and labour-intensive task
Undergoing a telecom expense audit is no small undertaking for any finance or IT department.
It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to go through line items on invoices, keep track of particular assets, and then record information manually on large Excel spreadsheets. If you’re auditing several assets from various teams from different places, the task gets more complicated and takes longer. Additionally, this increase creates the potential for human error and mistakes when recording information.
One option is for businesses to set up periodic “hygiene” processes to keep current and accurate data. The replacement of large audits with smaller, less frequent tasks means that when you are required to need to conduct the audit, it’s quicker and easier.
3. No software automates tasks
As previously mentioned above, auditing can be a manual procedure. The data can be gathered from a variety of sources:
- Examining bills line-by-line
- Incorrect documentation and excessive charges
- Tracking devices
- Listing down the services used
- Matching fees and rates in the contract
All this information is stored manually on Excel spreadsheets. Since Excel is not able to connect to other programs or systems, it is the responsibility of the teams that maintain and maintain inventory records, keep track of expenditures, and track changes to service and use. Team members must also collaborate and work with the other divisions within the company to share, report, and consolidate information.
Without an application or platform to streamline tasks, the telecom audit places an enormous amount of stress on team members and staff to capture information with 100% accuracy, making it nearly impossible to finish.
4. No clear action on results
So, your team has been working hard for hours collecting, recording, and analyzing all the information related to your company’s telecom expenses. Your team has accomplished what was impossible and finished the telecom expenses audit!
What do you do next? What are the best ways to collect and present the results? Who is the person who needs to act? One of the biggest challenges in conducting a telecom expense audit is the lack of clarity and guidance about what to do when the audit has been completed. Everyone seems to be so focused on the tasks that are involved during the audit, but no one actually knows how to use the audit results.
The acquisition of audit certification only marks the first step of the audit process. Report and share results across all teams involved, procurement, IT, accounts payable and finance, budgeting, planning, and senior management. The results can be acted upon by every team member to make the changes needed in processes and to realize the savings in cost.
Also read: Client Bookkeeping Solutions: Improve Business Efficiency
5. Insufficient internal expertise
Let’s admit it. Many internal teams don’t have the knowledge and experience required to handle the complexity of mobile technology and telecommunications. This is cause telecom audits take a long time and can be a stressful and confusing experience for those who conduct them.
Have you thought about outsourcing to a managed telecom provider for added support? They will provide the tools to monitor and control all of your telecom costs. They are also telecom experts; they are aware of what to look for and will take less time to complete tasks. In addition, due to their decades of expertise, the companies are able to provide best-practice knowledge and know-how to optimize your telecom resources and services regularly.
Many Managed Service Providers and Organisations take advantage of audit opportunities to implement change through new platforms and an end-to-end TEM and lifecycle system, which offers all of the information and insights you require in one centralised location. It simplifies the process of reviewing and introduces a brand new platform-based method of managing processes, assets, and expenditures regularly, and includes improvements like:
- Automate manual tasks, processes, and workflows
- Streamline and unify records and information across departments and teams.
- Digitally track assets and services
- You can easily analyze expenses and usage
- Create seamless user and cost-based reports
- Maintain your inventory up-to-date, easily accessible, and managed quickly.
Utilizing a telecom expense audit platform in your business will reduce the process of preparing and utilizing resources for future audits. In many instances, it eliminates the requirement since you’ll be able to incorporate the controls into your everyday telecom management.
Conclusion
Conducting a telecom expense audit can be complex, presenting companies with difficulties like inaccurate billing, hidden fees, decentralized data storage, and limited internal resources. Yet this task must be accomplished to reduce costs and enhance operational efficiencies. Businesses can do this through creating clear processes, taking advantage of automation tools, or by working alongside an outside managed telecom provider who will give control over telecom expenses while uncovering significant cost-cutting opportunities.
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