Telecom expense management (TEM)
The work, and the software, for tracking, checking and allocating what a business pays for mobile, phone, internet and data services.
In short
- It covers line and device inventory, invoice collection, audit, cost allocation and plan changes.
- Errors hide in many small recurring lines: unused lines, outdated plans and expired credits.
- Carrier invoices often live on a portal, which makes collecting them the first step to control.
Telecom expense management, or TEM, is how a business keeps control of what it pays carriers for mobile lines, landlines, internet and data. It covers knowing which lines and devices exist, checking each carrier invoice against the plan you signed, sending each cost to the right team and cancelling what nobody uses.
Why telecom bills need their own process
Telecom spending is recurring, spread across many small lines and billed in formats that change from one carrier to the next. A mid-sized company can have hundreds of mobile lines across two or three carriers, each with its own plan, roaming add-ons and device payments. Errors are common: lines that stay active after an employee leaves, plans that no longer match usage, promotional credits that expire without notice and taxes charged at the wrong rate.
What TEM usually includes
- Inventory: a list of every line, device and account, with its owner and cost centre.
- Invoice collection: getting each carrier invoice every cycle, often from an online portal rather than by email.
- Audit: comparing the invoice with the contract and the previous month to catch overcharges.
- Allocation: splitting the bill across departments, projects or clients.
- Optimization: moving lines to cheaper plans and closing the ones no one uses.
The invoice side
Most of the friction starts before any audit. Carrier invoices sit behind a login on the Bell, Rogers, TELUS or Vidéotron portal in Canada, or the AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile portal in the US, and someone has to remember to download them. Bill fetching in Smartbills signs in to those portals each billing cycle, downloads the invoice, reads the account number, dates, amount and tax, and sends it to accounts payable already coded. Smartbills covers that collection and coding work. Device inventory and plan optimization are the job of a dedicated TEM tool or your carrier account team.
Worked example
Forty-eight lines, two carriers
A 60-person company has 48 mobile lines split between two carriers. A review of three months of invoices finds seven lines still billed for people who left, at $55 a month each. Closing them saves $385 a month, or $4,620 a year, and the review also catches a $240 roaming add-on that was never removed after a trip.