ABN Telecom XPress has been designed with the unique needs of mid-to large-sized businesses in mind. Read about how we’ve helped three very different businesses save time and money by automating their telecom invoices.
A Midwest regional bank with 33 branches and $2 billion in assets was seeking to automate their invoice processing with a particular focus on streamlining their telecommunications bill intake. The bank receives bills from 4 telecommunication providers and decided to begin their initial automation efforts on Sprint, since that comprised a majority of their wireless expense, with over 150 employees having Sprint accounts. These employees represented a wide cross section of the company’s departments, including everything from facilities management to branch managers and the executive team.
Sprint bills were being processed manually on a monthly basis by accounts payable clerks inside the finance department. Each month, the bills were opened sorted and summarized by department and then distributed manually for approval. Often the Sprint bills had to be paid prior to all approvals in order to avoid late charges. Routing was done through inter department manila envelopes or PDF and email attachments.
ABN XPress Telecom solved this problem easily and quickly. The inbound intake of invoices was pre keyed so that each phone line was already attached to its associated department and roll ups were done in seconds. Distribution of the departmental phone bills was now done electronically and approval was done with the click of a mouse. If there were issues with any of the charges, they could be flagged and returned to the clerk for investigation.
Finally, instead of manually keying in charges into the banks general ledger all of this was done electronically.
Four days of work was now reduced to two hours.
A midsized energy company, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, with 200 employees was seeking to automate their inbound telecommunications bills. The IT department was tasked with processing the company’s inbound telecommunications bills on a monthly basis, since it was their responsibility to support all smart phones and wireless laptops.
Their goal was to be able to get all cell phone and data plan charges per user entered into their accounting system quickly and easily. For reporting purposes, they split out the monthly access charges, voice charges (over and above monthly access charges – which include some voice and data), and data charges – again over the baseline in the monthly access charges and taxes. They had to lump together more specific details like equipment charges and roaming, simply because there was not enough time to measure and monitor those charges in any detail.
The company had been loading all of the paper based data into Excel and then coding it for entry into their accounting system so it could be billed back to departments via the user on a monthly basis.
This was a time consuming and onerous process and wrought with errors, particularly when having to translate the data from a paper-based invoice into the Excel spreadsheet. On average it took 2 full days per month.
After implementing ABN XPress Telecom, the required data sorting and coding was now done in minutes.
A publically owned utility with 2,000 employees’ located in the Midwest receives invoices into their telecommunications department from 8 cellular and landline based telecom vendors. One full time analyst is responsible for processing all of these inbound paper based invoices. This is a time consuming and labor intensive process.
There are over 5,000 pages of telecom bills coming into the company on a monthly basis from all of their telco vendors. One vendor, Verizon, averages 1,200 pages of monthly detail alone, for 720 cellular numbers. Verizon bills the utility an average of $30,000 per month.
The utility has a work force that is comprised of multiple functional areas, including engineers, linesmen, field forestry experts, and technicians. Each of these individuals is equipped with cell phones, smartphones wireless laptops and desk phone and all report up through various departments, which are separate cost centers.
The analyst spends 7 -8 business days processing the Verizon bills alone. Paper based workflow is comprised first of opening, sorting and stacking the paper based bills by the various departments. Next is entering each individual’s charges into a massive Excel spreadsheet and then applying GL codes. Next step is rolling up the bills by department and making sure all of the taxes and special fees are correctly accounted for. Finally the bill must be scanned to PDF and archived in the appropriate manner.
Using the ABN XPress Telecom this end-to-end process takes roughly 4 hours versus 7 – 8 days to process Verizon monthly bills. The utility has 7 additional vendors that present identical challenges.
