The importance of automating and standardizing your invoicing process cannot be underestimated. It allows a fast and efficient management of billing which reduces the margins for error and the risk of abuse compared to a manually driven process.

Billing management in many companies is manually driven.

We often find that financial administrators do not understand the impact of the services being billed and the associated impact on business.

There are risks associated with billing:

Everyone within a business has access to ICT services, which means that each employee has the opportunity to abuse/misuse it. Based on research done by Telesa, abuse/misuse of services typically found in companies are in the region of 27% and 51%. Yes, sSome companies have put telephone management systems in place, but they tend to be inefficient and inevitably fail to manage such behaviour and furthermore only focuses on one aspect of the management area.

The Solution: Telegence

Telegence is a Telesa solution that serves as a valuable corporate business enabler, including all aspects of vendor bill management from invoice collection to contract compliance.

Telegence is fully automated

No financial administrator or clerk is needed to manage the invoices processing. Invoices are sometimes lost even within the service providers environments, which becomes a nightmare to try and track it. This results in provisions having to be made to accommodate the fact that they didn’t receive the invoice. The Telesa system will go to the service provider’s financial system itself, collect the invoice and bring it into the Telesa environment.

Invoices are segmented to the last unit

Once the invoice is brought into the Telesa environment, it is segmented right down to the last unit. This is then audited against the contracts in place to ensure that the right rates are applicable. It audits against any services that were loaded or removed over time, and then tries to understand that operational usage of that unit.

It then breaks those costs right down to the individual unit level in order to allocate to the financial systems. This gives more clarity to where the systems belong and allows them to be allocated to the right environments. Outside of the Telesa process, this allocation is typically flawed in businesses, as invoice allocation to business units are often based on the invoice number and not the information within the invoice itself.

Invoices are allocated to the correct cost centres.

You typically find that some services are billed on the wrong invoice and are hence allocated to the wrong site or cost centre. Once all these services have been broken down to the cost centre level they, as with the Telegence system, should be supported by an automatic file that gets produced to go straight into the financial systems for the customer. Any discrepancies in the invoicing are highlighted and automatically sent back to the service provider for rectification.

Visibility of behaviour

Now that all services have been broken down to the n’th degree, you can start implementing highly intelligent business tools to understand employee behaviour. Areas of misuse and abuse are highlighted and visibility is created with both the end user and the entire structure above the end user.

This enables the company to put in a process that can be supported by HR policy, where the end user is held accountable for the services that they have abused. A recovery process can then be put in place to get that funding back from the end user.

Reduction in rates of abuse

With the implementation of these processes, you typically find that the before mentioned rate of abuse (between 27 and 51%) drops to between 7 and 11%. This has a major impact on the business from a cost point of view, as well as an efficiency point of view, as employees are spending less time on personal events during business time.

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