Telecom expense management
The bill nobody checks
See what your mobile and telco spend actually is. Every Telstra bill audited against your contracted rates, every charge allocated to the right cost centre by rule, and every exception surfaced while there is still time to act on it. Month-end stops being a reconstruction exercise.
Too detailed to check, close enough to approve
Telco billing is the one line of operating cost that almost nobody audits. It arrives monthly, it is too detailed to check by hand, and it is close enough to last month that it clears approval. The errors inside it are not dramatic. They are a service still billing eleven months after the person left, a plan that stopped matching usage two years ago, a roaming charge nobody flagged, and a credit that was promised and never applied.
None of it is large enough to notice on its own. That is precisely why it survives, month after month, until somebody adds it up.
What an audit usually finds
Not fraud, and rarely a rate that was wrong from the start. Four things turn up on nearly every account, and none of them is large enough on its own to have been questioned.
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Services billing for people who left
Still active eleven months after the handset came back, because nobody told anybody to cancel it and the line is too small to stand out on a summary.
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Plans that stopped matching usage
Chosen against how the business used mobiles two years ago and still billing against how it uses them now. Usually in both directions at once, with some users capped and others paying for allowance they never touch.
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Roaming nobody arranged
A trip taken without a pack in place, found on the bill instead of before departure. The single most expensive category of surprise on a mobile account.
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Credits promised and never applied
A dispute agreed on a phone call, recorded nowhere either party can produce afterwards, and absent from every bill since.
Each of these clears approval every month because each of them, on its own, looks like a rounding difference against last month.
Connect, analyse, govern
The first stage is where the work is. Once the rules are right, the other two run every cycle without anyone reconstructing anything.
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Connect
Your accounts, services and hierarchies are aligned, and the allocation rules are configured with you: how costs are split, how charges are handled, and where each one lands.
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Analyse
Bills are checked against your contracted rates and usage refreshes into reporting every four hours, rather than once a month when the bill arrives. Exceptions and trends are confirmed rather than assumed.
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Govern
The insight is applied: plans right-sized against actual usage, disputes resolved, journals automated into your finance system, and regular reviews keeping spend on track.
Audit, allocate, report
Three jobs. The first finds the money, the second puts it where it belongs, and the third produces something your finance system will accept without reformatting.
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Audit
Every bill checked against what you actually agreed to pay.
- Contracted rates compared to actual charges
- Discrepancies flagged automatically
- Credits lodged with the carrier and pursued
- Disputes followed through to a written outcome
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Allocate
Charges landing where they belong, by rule rather than by hand.
- Unlimited cost centre splits per service
- Programmable rules by product, charge or discount
- Hardware and project charges broken out to the right budget
- Personal calls claimed by the user each month
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Report
What finance needs, in the format finance already uses.
- Journals built to SAP, Oracle and equivalent import rules
- Exceptions on budget breaches and cancelled services
- Roaming spikes, high-cost calls and usage trends
- Exports at service or cost centre level
- Service, SIM and device inventory tracked by IMEI
We will not quote you a percentage
Every provider in this category leads with a savings figure, and none of them has seen your account. What an audit finds depends entirely on how your services were built up and how long they have been left alone. It is usually cancelled services still billing, plans that stopped matching usage, roaming nobody flagged and credits never pursued, and the first billing cycle through the platform is where it surfaces. We will tell you what we find after we have looked, and not before.
What this is, and what it is not
The boundary matters here more than most, because the failure mode is a confident report built on rules nobody maintained.
What it does
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Audits against your contract
Not against a benchmark or an industry average. Your contracted Telstra rates, compared to what you were actually charged, line by line.
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Allocates by rule, not by hand
Cost centre structures and splits configured once and applied every cycle, so month-end is a review rather than a rebuild.
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Pursues the credits
Disputes lodged with Telstra on your behalf, progress reported, and a written outcome rather than a case number.
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Runs on its own
It works against your account whether or not you take the managed mobile service, though most customers take both because insight and the ability to act on it work better together.
What it does not do
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Not an accounting system
It produces journals for your finance system. It does not replace it, and it does not process payment.
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Not a guarantee of savings
We audit against your contracted rates and recover what is genuinely wrong. What the audit finds depends on your account, and we will not quote a percentage before we have seen it.
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Not a renegotiation service
Optimising plans against actual usage is included. Renegotiating your carrier contract is a separate commercial engagement.
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Not automatic
Rules are configured with you at onboarding and reviewed as the business changes. A cost centre structure nobody maintains produces confident, wrong reporting.
Questions finance teams ask
Short answers first.
Will this reduce our bill?
Usually, though the first saving is rarely a rate reduction. It is cancelled services still billing, plans that stopped matching usage, roaming charges nobody flagged, and credits never pursued. What cannot be promised is a percentage before your account has been seen.
How long before we see anything?
The first billing cycle through the platform is where exceptions surface. Onboarding covers discovery of accounts, services and hierarchies, configuration of cost centres and allocation rules, and alignment of your user and service inventories.
Does it work with our finance system?
Journals are generated as Excel or CSV built to your system's formatting rules, including SAP and Oracle. If your system has a specific import format, it is configured during onboarding rather than worked around afterwards.
Can we split one service across departments?
Yes, across an unlimited number of cost centres, with no restriction on the number of splits per service. Rules can be permanent or applied as a one-off.
Do we need the managed mobile service as well?
No. Expense management can run against your account on its own, though most customers take it alongside the managed service because the billing insight and the ability to act on it work better together.
Does this work if we are not on Telstra?
No. Ericom is a Telstra partner and the mobility services, including this one, run on Telstra. The audit compares your charges against your contracted Telstra rates, so it needs a Telstra account to work against.
Start with a billing review
We will look at a recent bill against your contracted rates and tell you what we find. It is the fastest way to know whether there is anything here worth pursuing, and if there is not, that is a useful thing to learn from one conversation.
Request a billing review