atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Telecom Service & Providers Phone bill auditing of large bills.

I have some experience with this but need more knowledge auditing bills.

Where is the best place to gain the knowledge?

Someone in ATL?

Back in the early 90's, I learned from Illinois Bell Centrex sales people and from Sprint sales people.

Today, I would make friends with a good CLEC salesperson, buy them a nice lunch and have them go over a fairly complicated bill for you.
This is how they make their money. A good salesperson can usually take a bill and come up with 20% savings all the time.

The key here is that the salesperson has to have a few yers of being on the street. Don't waste your time with someone who just got hired off the street.

Be wary of who you talk to, though...make sure they are somebody whom you can trust. I've seen several occasions where a telecom consultant (especially the 50%-ers) has come in and shown how you can save all kinds of money by going over to XYZ company and changing services around. Might look good on paper but sometimes what they do is cut out services that you actually need somewhere in the fine print and then walk away.

It's truly shameful that telephone bills have been allowed to become such a nightmare with all of the combined taxes and other charges these days. Add all of the rip offs that seem to be everywhere and it just becomes unbelievable!

From what I've seen in the last few years this is among the largest cash cows that ever came down the pike as far as local, state, and any other entity with taxing ability have tapped. And I'm afraid it's going to get worse.

So, hold on to your britches folks, the creek has not crested yet!

The first thing to get is the Customer Service Record from the provider. Verizon provides this on their bills under Services and Equipment info. Make sure you are not still paying for any discontinued lines, services, hunting, DID blocks. You can usually negotiate a cheaper rate on services like message units and extended area calling.

When I first started working in government part of my job was to audit and allocate the charges to departments. The experience that I’m relating to is for a 500-line account with several locations. Try to gain online access to your account(s). Once you have that you can get the Customer Service Record that was mentioned above. The online access can provide you with some tools and tips as to what to look for. You can save some of the bill data to a spreadsheet that will allow you to sort charges like long distance and other usage type fees by call number. The Customer Service Record should give service locations. Again, like was mentioned above, look at your lines and circuits. If your account has any size, my bet is that there are lines or circuits not being used. You may need to do some fieldwork to determine if a line or circuit is connected to any type of terminal equipment. Have disconnect orders issued for unused lines or circuits. Look at the features that you have and how they are being billed. Sometimes combining groups of features will result in a lower rate. Make sure that you don’t have any of what we used to refer to as Out WATS service for long distance. You should be able to get a long distance rate that is cheaper than these older services. Check to see if you can take advantage of any group negotiated rates. In my case, schools, towns, cities, and counties could take advantage of a State negotiated rate.

Once you have determined that everything that you are being billed for in the way of lines and circuits you can begin to concentrate on the various monthly usage charges. Are the long distance calls mostly business related. Do you see a pattern of long distance calls being placed from one number to another? Reverse Lookup helps here. Look for constant calls from one number or numbers to things like 411. Once you start looking at the bills things begin to jump out at you. It’s not too bad once you clean things up using the Customer Service Record.