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Posted by on July 15, 2008, 6:59 pm
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> 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.
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Posted by Al Gillis on July 18, 2008, 1:29 am
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>
>> 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.
>
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
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Posted by Geoffrey Welsh on July 23, 2008, 9:36 pm
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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".
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.
> Finally, one knowledgeable manager began to insist that the
> appropriate Telecomm Professional be responsible for their invoices.
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.
--
Geoffrey Welsh <Geoffrey [dot] Welsh [at] bigfoot [dot] com>
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Posted by on July 24, 2008, 4:23 pm
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> 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.
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.
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