Telecom expense management
Audited against the contract, every month
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 in the billing cycle it belongs to, while the credit can still be claimed. Month-end stops being a reconstruction exercise.
Too detailed to check, close enough to approve
Telco billing is the line of operating cost that is approved most often and checked least. 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 small, recurring, and individually below the threshold anyone would query.
The structural reason is that the bill is produced by Telstra from the account as it stands, and the account as it stands is the sum of every request ever actioned against it, not the fleet as it is today. Nothing in the approval path compares the two. Finance sees a total against a budget, IT sees a request queue, the agreement that sets the rates sits in a drawer, and the only document that could reconcile all three is the one being approved without being read.
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 the leaver process ends at the handset and does not reach the service, 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 organisation 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 do not use.
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Roaming that was not arranged
A trip taken without a pack in place, found on the bill instead of before departure. Often the largest single line the audit finds.
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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.
Together they are usually the difference between a bill that matches the agreement and one that does not, and none of them is found by reading the summary page. They are found by comparing every line to the rate that should have applied.
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 instead of once a month when the bill arrives, so a roaming spike or a budget breach is visible before the bill that carries it. Exceptions and trends are confirmed from the data before anyone is asked to act on them.
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Govern
Plans are right-sized against actual usage, disputes are lodged and followed to a written outcome, journals are generated for your finance system each cycle, and spend is reviewed with you at an agreed cadence.
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 Telstra and pursued
- Disputes followed through to a written outcome
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Allocate
Charges landing where they belong, on rules configured once.
- 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. The four things it usually finds are listed above, and the first billing cycle through the platform is where they surface. 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 allocation rules that stopped matching the organisation.
What it does
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Audits against your agreement
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 the outcome in writing.
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Runs on its own
It works against your account whether or not you take the managed mobile service. Most customers take both, because the audit finds the errors and the managed service is what stops them recurring.
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 Telstra agreement is a separate commercial engagement.
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Not automatic
Rules are configured with you at onboarding and reviewed as the organisation changes. A cost centre structure that is not maintained produces confident, wrong reporting.
“This has been a tremendous result for Jemena and we would highly recommend this service to any business that requires independent investigation into their mobility offering.”
Telecommunications Expense and Vendor Manager, Jemena
Questions finance teams ask
Short answers first.
Will this reduce our bill?
Usually, though the first saving is rarely a rate reduction. It is the four things listed above, and how much they add up to depends on how long the account has been left alone. 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. It runs against your account on its own, and a good number of customers take it that way. Pairing it with the managed service means the errors the audit finds are cancelled at source instead of found again next cycle.
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.
One bill is usually enough
We will look at a recent bill against your contracted rates and tell you what we find. It is usually enough to show which of the four things above are on the account and roughly what they add up to.
Request a billing review