What is Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and when does your company need it?

TEM stands for Telecom Expense Management. It is the set of processes, and usually tools, that lets a company know which telecom services it has, how much it pays for them, whether what it pays is correct, and whether it could pay less for the same thing.

Put another way: TEM means treating phone and data services as what they are, a significant cost line that deserves the same control as any other.

What telecom expense management covers

A complete TEM model spans the whole service lifecycle:

Inventory

Knowing which lines, devices, services and contracts exist, who uses them and which cost centre they belong to. It is the foundation for everything else: without an inventory you cannot audit or optimise.

Contracts

Having the current terms with each carrier at hand: rates, discounts, minimum-term commitments and expiry dates.

Invoice audit

Checking every month that what is billed matches what was contracted and the inventory. We explain it in detail in Telecom invoice audit.

Cost allocation

Splitting the cost across departments, projects, sites or countries, so each manager sees their share and the accounts reflect it correctly.

Optimisation

Matching plans to real usage, removing unused lines, adding bundles where they make sense and preparing the next carrier negotiation with data in hand.

Change management

New lines, cancellations, plan changes and device renewals, with a record of who requested what and when.

Signs your company needs TEM

There is no magic number of lines above which TEM becomes essential. What there are is symptoms:

• Nobody knows for sure how many lines you have or who each one is assigned to.
• You work with more than one carrier, or in more than one country, and every invoice has a different format.
• The invoice is approved by comparing totals with last month.
• The inventory lives in a spreadsheet that gets updated when someone remembers.
• Departments do not know what they spend on telecoms, or the split is done by hand.
• The bill goes up and nobody can explain why.
• Leavers do not always lead to their lines being cancelled.

If you recognise two or three of these, you are very likely paying more than you need to and spending too many hours keeping it under control.

Three ways to do TEM

1. In-house, with spreadsheets

The most common way to start. It works while volumes are small and there is someone with the time and know-how. The risk is dependence on that person and the difficulty of keeping it current every month.

2. With a TEM platform run by your team

A specialised tool automates the repetitive work (loading invoices, reconciliation, alerts, reports) and your team focuses on decisions. It suits companies with people who can dedicate time to it but should not spend that time copying data.

3. As a managed service

A specialised external team runs the platform for you: it reviews invoices, handles disputes and presents the conclusions. It fits when you lack in-house capacity or prefer control to sit with people who work in the sector every day.

There is no best option in the abstract: it depends on each company's volume, complexity and resources.

What to ask of a TEM platform

If you decide to rely on a tool, these are the questions worth asking:

• Does it work with all my carriers, or only some?
• Does it integrate with my systems (MDM, Active Directory, ERP), or will I have to maintain the inventory by hand?
• Does it reconcile invoices against the contract, or just display them?
• Can it allocate costs according to my cost-centre structure?
• Does it keep an audit trail of every change and every issue?
• Where is the data hosted? We are talking about phone numbers, employees and costs.
• Who handles the rollout, and how much work is it for my team?

EPItoolbox

EPItoolbox is a TEM platform that brings inventory, contracts and invoices from all your carriers into one place, integrated with your MDM, Active Directory and ERP. It audits every invoice, allocates costs by cost centre and keeps a full audit trail of every change.

You can use it with your own team, with the support of a TEM consultant or as a managed service. Find out more on the services and platform pages.