FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Advisory
Who is Intelligent Bills?
Intelligent Bills is a professional services firm focused on helping its clients draft, develop, and implement Total Telecom Cost Management Solutions. The firm was founded in early 2005 to assist businesses manage and control their communication costs more effectively. For the last thrity years, the core team of subject matter experts at Intelligent Bills has delivered flexible telecom solutions through billing compliance, professional services and telecom expense management for some of today’s larger TEM solution providers focused strictly on the Fortune 500 marketplace.
In our mutual best interests, we engage in discussions that are destined to create a Win-Win for both parties. accordingly, we evaluate your environment in a no fee discovery session that is designed to determine the customer’s needs and priorities through a series of Q & A’s. Regardless of the amount of time that lapses, there is no cost upfront.
What makes Intellligent Bills unique?
Intelligent Bills delivers extraordinary services in a timely fashion focused on Speed to Results. Accomplished by addressing customer pain points, delivering services differently than our competitors, producing verifiable results, and having a strict fee mission statement, that states. “if we don’t save you any money, then there are no fees.”
How experienced is the Intelligent Bills team?
For more than 30 years, our core team of subject matter experts have delivered flexible telecom and technology expense management solutions through our professional advisory services, contract negotiations, spend analysis, auditing and optimization, licensing compliance and more. We have saved nearly $2 Billion for our 700+ clients around the globe.
Shouldn't you be talking to our IT department?
We work primarily with fiscal executives because we are not looking to change your technology or pull any wires. We operate from a purely fiscal perspective and are simply looking to move more money to your bottom line. While IT may certainly be involved, it’s essential that we have buy in from the fiscal executives first.
Do we need to buy software from Intelligent Bills?
Intelligent Bills has the telecom/technology services knowledge your organization needs without purchasing costly software, or paying for services you really don’t need. The adage of “Garbage in is Garbage Out” comes to mind when trying to use technology to clean up billing. Our reports are customizable and provide actionable intelligence.
Aren't all TEM providers basically the same?
In our experience, we can safely say that they are not. These services have evolved over the years where technological breakthroughs have create efficiencies for the provider but hurt the vendor/client relationship. As many have experienced this with their telecom vendors, the approach it to push back on the client to self-manage. This is where the gap exists with all the providers and in many cases use an organization like Intelligent Bills to insert itself in the middle to manage and optimize the experience.
We have so many vendors to manage and pay, is there a way to consolidate all of this?
Our job is to help you determine the best approach for your business without increasing cost and sometimes reducing it via an aggregated spend. For example, a client with numerous offices often pays the provider separately for each location. Intelligent Bills can help you aggregate services and consolidate vendors to greatly simplify bill pay as well as your entire business process lifecycle for all IT, Telecom and Technology services.
How much will it cost to save money? What if you don't find any savings?
Nothing! If we’re not able to lower your technology expenses, we don’t charge a dime. There are no upfront fees or monthly subscriptions.
Who implements the recommendations if we want to go forward?
We do! Intelligent Bills provides the full spectrum of Source-to-Pay solutions. We will manage the implementation and much more for you. who can embed themselves with your process and your team, fight battles with providers on your behalf and have decades of experience accessing refunds and credits. Neither you, nor your staff need to spend a minute on the phone with any vendor.
Cost-Reduction
What type of technology savings can Intelligent Bills find?
Our Cost Reduction Services can retroactively identify billing mistakes and errors and bring that money back in the form of a refund check or credit across all technology and telecom services. We also identify nonworking and unused services, as well as other cost savings opportunities through market analysis, volume leveraging, services consolidation, rate improvement and more.
What type of results can I expect?
Depending on the scope, it varies, but 20-30% is very common, again all contingent on scope and client participation. Key Areas of Annualized Savings:
- Advisory Services can net between 5-25% savings through hard and soft dollars
- Cost Reduction services can net between 5-30% savings and recovery
- Tech & Telecom Services can net between 10-30% savings
Will we need to do this cost-reduction process more than once?
Your business needs are rapidly evolving, just like the telecom and technology industries, so it does make good fiscal sense to repeat the process in the future. We have numerous repeat clients and most stay with us for several years.
As an alternative though, many clients sign up for one of our ongoing programs geared to continuously managing and monitoring contracts, usage, spending and to stay ahead of any errors or issues.
Can Intelligent Bills audit my Telecom and IT Bills?
Yes. Intelligent Bills can identify billing errors in seconds, validate carrier contracts, cost per minute billed versus contracted rates and much more.
Besides Telecom, what other technology expense audits do you execute?
Intelligent Bills provides Full Defense for all Microsoft, Oracle & SAP Audit Engagements by incorporating proprietary tools, expertise and confidence to assist with reversing and resolving any inconsistencies.
These types of audits have been the service providers game for decades. If you run your business on any of these providers, in some cases you experienced these nightmares, and/or have implicitly agreed to egregious terms allowing for these audits to continue.
We prepare your organization to win in these scenarios. Our goal is to commoditize the audit defense market by pre-empting and overseeing formal license reviews.
Do I have options other than an annual Telecom Audit?
Yes, with Intelligent Bills you do. We provide an ongoing monthly management service that reviews, inquires, disputes and resolves all billing issues. This approach is a service-based fee that allows for maximum ROI by simply keeping the funding in house without the need to pay out and recover back every year from various vendors.
We don't have a great handle on inventory. We are still being billed for services at locations that have moved or closed?
For decades, the Intelligent Bills team has been auditing active, closed, and sold locations for our clients. Our audit team will ensure each site is evaluated, create an inventory of billed services and compare those to a variety of client and service provider datasets. The end result is 99%+ accuracy of and visibility into your services. This often leads to exponential savings up to 30% or more.
Shouldn't my vendor account team clean up my bills for me?
Simply put, this is like having the fox watch the hen house. Your provider's account team has no financial incentive to help you clean up your billing. Lowering your subscriptions and invoiced costs would lower the commissions and/or bonuses they are paid for growing your account.
Telecom & Technology
Why are we still paying install and late fees when we shouldn't?
These are most likely billing errors or even fraud. Intelligent Bills can identify the break in the processes and recover all incorrectly billed dollars for its clients. Our staff can expand these services to enhance your savings, create inventories, and streamline the way you pay for IT services.
What are all these Telecom Fees?
On average close to 80% of all telecom invoices are incorrect and include charges that company should not have to pay.
Many organizations don’t know what they are paying in excess of 30% or more than they need to be for telecom and data services through fees, taxes and surcharges.
We help visualize your current state and roadmap a solution(s) to place controls thereby eliminating this unwarranted expense.
We are inundated with change requests. Do you have an effective method for managing MACD activity?
Of course we do. Intelligent Bills provides the tools and experience to put controls in place focused on inventory, project management, quote generation etc. through multiple providers, rate verification, and reporting. The end result is a streamlined process with complete visibility at any phase of the change order process eliminating menial tasks as well as the frustration for your team, freeing them to focus on more important issues.
How do you manage vendor credits and open carrier disputes?
Our SmartView Tracker allows you to track all credits due, billing disputes and much more. Keep notes, emails, documents, and discussions with your vendors, and track dates and times and what was discussed. Alert notifications and scheduled reporting will let you know when the credit(s) should have appeared.
Can we eliminate spreadsheets for IT/Telecom expense tracking?
Ideally, using RPA Technology, data mapping and vendor downloads in a TEM Service could easily create soft and hard dollar savings. A tailored approach to your needs is a best practice approach we pursue, as each organization has different requirements, but we can help.
My bills are riddled with errors month after month. How can we resolve IT / Telecom billing disputes?
This is no easy feat for anyone. Vendors will always want to slow down the process of billing disputes.
Check out our blog post on this topic.
The resolution process is always trying, time-consuming and often extremely frustrating. Resolutions can vary from vendor to vendor. A client’s large spend can leverage more from a provider, but the opposite is also true and less of a spend makes refunds more difficult to recapture.
Intelligent Bills has 30+ years of know-how and experience at all spend levels to ensure you recover every dollar owed to your organization.
What can we do if our TEM provider keeps missing billing errors?
Each client deserves a TEM Provider that can complete services that it was contracted to accomplish.
Oftentimes, organizations opt to the replace the provider with a new one, however there is a better solution. Intelligent Bills can be commissioned to observe and audit the work of the original TEM provider resulting in a potential remedy for efficiency gains for the client as well as the TEM provider and of course, more savings.