Managing telecoms billing information for thousands of services is difficult because of the sheer volume of data. Without a platform to manage billing, organisations rely on month to month variance analysis of their telecom bills, without really understanding it.
In many instances, it creates an accepted tolerance of inefficiency – because getting real insight requires more man hours than an IT or finance department can typically spare. Manual processes using spreadsheets are protracted and laborious. Some customers use carrier billing systems to extract some billing detail, but typically, expenses are managed by exception based on month-to-month variances.
Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential insights hidden in your telecom bills.If June looks pretty much like May and May like April, perhaps nobody will ever know about the 100 redundant services you’ve been paying for over the last nine months.
With a tool like Bluewater that gives you a centralised view, you can get automated billing ingestion which immediately maps service costs against employees and cost centres. Bluewater ingests all billing information from different carriers into a single platform for comprehensive telecoms reporting.
If you’re keen to ditch journals and spreadsheets for automated cost centre allocations, reporting and general ledger monthly output, read a little further.
Using Bluewater’s “bill analysis” tool, you can gain complete visibility of all changes to your organisation’s bills month on month at the click of a button. This will show all contributions to change; for both increases and decreases in an easy to understand charge based filtered display.
In addition to the top level change overview, this tool also enables bill variance reconciliation in a detailed report, showing every charge variance across all services in the account, including:
- Changes to recurring charges
- Credits (gained and lost due to service changes)
- New services or products being billed
This ultimately enables the auditing of service level provisions based on new service charges which this report highlights.
Bluewater also offers the Executive Dashboard – your window into all of your telecom expenses and assets. This interactive dashboard gives visibility into:
- Monthly active service changes vs the associated spend
- Monthly cost trends to track usage/charges at various levels (fleet, account, cost centre, service)
- Best practice exception reporting to provide visibility on highest service costs
- Top International roaming users
- Redundant services with nil usage month on month
- Complete vs outstanding orders
- Total count and contents with full cost association across all applicable orders
…and more.
Having instant visibility over telecoms information saves IT and finance hours and in many cases days per month. The productivity benefits alone pay for a platform like Bluewater’s.
In an age where organisations demand strong, informed decisions from leaders, there is no denying that accessible data is high-value. A lack of data visibility costs organisations days of unnecessary labour, but also the data and decision-making ability to control the environment. This leaves finance and IT leaders beholden to users, managers and vendors for second-hand information. This is counterintuitive to an environment where otherwise strong leadership decisions can be made.
For IT and finance leaders who want to be able to see what they have, what they use, what they need and when they’ll need it, Bluewater is not really a nice-to-have. It’s a leadership necessity.
If you’re ready to start making more informed telecom decisions, then book a demo to see how Bluewater Control can give you the data you need at the click of a button.
