Auditing telephone bills [Re: PicturePhone at 1964 World's Fair] [Telecom]

  That is when I discovered that the way most telephone bills are

> audited i s: "If it looks pretty much like last month's bill, just > pay it and don't  ask questions".

You're lucky they did at least that.

We've had so many managers who didnj't even compare one month to the next. That is, say monthly bills ran $94, 104, 92, 100, 98, 102, then one bill was $402. You'd think a manager would question as to why it was so much different. (Heck, even my ill mother was able to see that pattern). But they'd just pay it. You wonder how these people are able to get dressed in the morning.

Reply to
hancock4
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Both the large companies I worked for were pretty much the same as regards telephone bills. I finally realized that, although the numbers were huge, those approving payment of the bills had bigger fish to fry than worrying about the "phone bill"! It was only during times of extreme financial exigencies that anyone expressed outrage at the charges. Of course, once the crisis passed all the managers went back to worrying about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and the "phone bill" went back on "automatic".

Finally, one knowledgeable manager began to insist that the appropriate Telecomm Professional be responsible for their invoices. So I began to have a little influence over challenging incorrect line items on our corporate voice invoices. Keeping things within 10% of correct was hard work and usually hinged on if we could show orders that we'd asked TelCo to disconnect or change a service. If we could show some documentation with dates and order numbers our money would come back in a few months. Of course we had to continually monitor our invoices for that item because it would rarely be removed or corrected the first time we asked!

Al

Reply to
Al Gillis

I understand what you're saying, but I think the phone bill has special status here. Ask those same managers to authorize a recurring charge (or an increase in an existing recurring charge) to improve service and they'll either find the time away from their philosophy session to discuss your suggestion or or they'll turn you down out of hand. Point out that what you're asking for is less than the monthly variation in the phone bill, and they'll probably reply with something like, "Yeah, but that's the PHONE BILL." In most organizations certain things such as phone bills and copy paper have a special privileged status, but phone bills get a lot more latitude than most because managers don't understand them and tend to doze off during explanations. This may be more true of managers whose experience includes differing rates by time of day, station-to-station vs. person-to-person, etc.

Something similar happened to me. What got it started was that someone in accounting needed someone to approve an invoice after our office services manager left, so she asked me if I knew what it was and who should approve it. It was an invoice for a dediciated link between two buildings we had moved out of two and a half years earlier. Every 12 months the invoice stated the service addresses and it got signed anyway! A manager wondered what it would be like to have me review all telecom invoices and we discovered that our conference call bridging service had overbilled us by $20,000 over a period of time, some U.S. 'home office' employees with U.S.-only long distance plans were being reimbursed for high per-minute rates when calling our Canadian head office in stead of using our reasonably priced toll-free number, and another U.S. employee thought that he was entitled to use the company calling card to cover lengthy calls to his girlfriend in Canada. Oh, and there was outrageous spending on mobile technology.

If an employee filed for $600 reimbursement for a meal, he'd better have a record of which clients were present. But $600 in calls to a number that isn't one of our clients passes unchallenged, as does spending about that much on a Blackberry because the person didn't like the Treo they bought last year to replace the Blackberry they didn't like after buying it the year before.

Reply to
Geoffrey Welsh

My company would not tolerate $600 usage charges in an assigned phone line except for well documented reasons. We have Centrex and we get a statement of calls (if over a few dollars); we must reimburse the company for personal calls. (As an aside, many of our calls go out over outward WATS lines, but we still are billed for the call time.)

I was once transferred from one team to another. My first team required me to make numerous toll calls. The bill came when I was on the second team, and my new manager reprimanded me for making too many toll calls; he wasn't the least bit interested in hearing that they were work-related. Needless to say, i was glad when I soon got off his team.

Reply to
hancock4

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