Billing errors happen every day!

In fact, they are one of the most common causes of overspending in an organization. How do these errors occur? They may occur when an invoice charge does not align properly with the terms of your contract. Or they may occur when you are simply billed for services you are not using.

Here's the problem. Instances of billing errors are going up, not down! Research shows that billing errors can occur in up to 11% of an organization's monthly invoice dollars. Depending on what your monthly telecom spend is, that could amount to thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Furthermore, many vendors have clauses in their contracts that limit the time period to dispute and adjust an invoice. That means that if you don't identify errors in time, you're out of luck. Another month down the drain.

Given such a large potential loss of money, you might wonder why that senior management isn't doing more about it. Many believe that it's impossible to catch these errors, or that it would take too much time to try to catch them. Others believe that it's just part of "the cost of doing business" and close their eyes to the large amounts of money lost to billing errors.

Either way, most would agree that being able to catch and correct billing errors could dramatically improve efficiency as well as your bottom line. And the good news is that there is a way to catch these errors. It's called Telecom Expense Management, or TEM, and it provides management with a powerful tool to identify billing errors before they fall outside the allotted invoice period (usually between 30-90 days).

Billing errors are certainly nothing new. And, the truth is, they will continue to plague companies that do not believe they can do anything about them. For those who decide to fight back with solutions such as TEM, however, the rewards can be substantial. For more information on areas where you might be losing money, download our white paper on "The Cost of Doing Nothing".