Understanding your telecoms invoices is about paying the correct amount that you owe your service providers, on time, so you avoid paying additional interest and penalties. There are a number of key items to check for on your invoice. One single person may not have all these answers, so you should know who is responsible and accountable for managing each service and ensure they are able to confirm that you are being invoiced for the correct number of services plus the service fee monthly.

1. Identify who in your company is authorised to contract telecoms and communication services.

These people should provide you with a copy of the contract that shows what services each service provider are contracted to deliver. Include all of the changes that may apply to the contract, and confirm that there are no additional services or missing services on your invoice.

2. Be sure that you understand how your invoice is constructed.

Depending on your service provider, your invoices will be presented in different ways. Ensuring that you understand how your invoice in constructed will allow you to understand what items in your invoice do indeed match the items in your contract. There may be many invoices from a single supplier, depending on the size and spread of your company. Are you able to understand your multiple invoices?

3. Are you getting the discounts that apply to your usage?

Due to the complexity and volume of data that needs to be checked, checking your discounts may require specialised people or systems that understand your contracts and also know where to investigate and find those services.

4. Confirm that all of the services on your invoice were authorised by the correct people.

This requires tracking of services and a monthly review with the service owner. In this meeting all of the service issues should be highlighted, and have comments included, ensuring that firstly the correct correspondence is shared with the relevant service provider and secondly that there is information supporting each event for historic records.

5. When reviewing your telecoms and communications budgets, are you checking that you are within your budgets?

It is not only nessesary to have a realistic budget, but also the mechanism of tracking actual behaviour against this budget.  Where you  have exceeded your budgets  you should have corresponding motivation to support those increases and tools to alrt you to these changes to allow you to manage through information.

If you have questions around managing your service provider invoices, contact Telesa where we will assist you in managing your telecoms and communication services.