Wireless is one of those bills that gets paid every month without anyone reading it. It started out reasonable, it goes up a little over time, and nobody has an afternoon to go through it line by line. For most businesses I talk to, that’s where the money goes.
I spent years running a data warehousing and business intelligence company, so I’ve looked at a lot of billing data. Wireless invoices are some of the messiest. Every charge on them is real. What doesn’t show up is the gap between what you’re paying and what you actually use, and it stays hidden until someone compares the two.
Here are five signs that gap is costing you.
1. You’re Paying for Lines Nobody Uses
Seasonal staff leave. A driver quits. A tablet sits in a drawer at a site you closed two years ago. The line stays active and billing, because canceling it was nobody’s job.
This happens a lot on Oahu, where tour operators, property managers and hospitality groups add and drop people with the seasons. If you can’t quickly match every line on your bill to a person or device still in use, some of those lines are probably dead.
2. Nobody Has Touched Your Plans Since Setup
Carrier rates change all the time, and the change almost never lowers the price of a plan you already have. If your plans were set up three or four years ago and nobody has looked at them since, you’re paying yesterday’s rates while the carrier sells new customers something better.
3. The Same Odd Charges Show Up Every Month
Overages, roaming fees, add-on features nobody remembers asking for. When a charge shows up once, someone might question it. When it shows up every month, it starts to look normal and gets paid.
Some of these are billing errors or charges nobody authorized. You can get credits for those, but only if someone catches them and asks.
4. Your Locations Are on Different Plans
If you have more than one location, and especially sites on Maui, Kauai or Hawaii Island, each one was probably set up at a different time by a different person on a different plan. Nobody has put them side by side since.
A good first check: can you get every line from every location onto one page? For a lot of businesses, that’s never been done.
5. You Think Your Expense Management Tool Has It Covered
These tools are good at showing what you spent. They’re much weaker at telling you what you should be paying. A tool can report your bill perfectly and never mention that the rate is wrong.
This is the sign that surprises people most. The savings figures below include businesses that already had one of these tools in place.
What Fixing It Looks Like
I work with providers that specialize in reducing wireless spend. They audit your lines and plans, negotiate directly with your carrier, recover billing errors, and keep managing the account afterward. They typically cut wireless spend by 27 to 32 percent.
Two things people don’t expect:
- You don’t switch carriers. Your phones, numbers and carrier stay the same. That matters here, because switching carriers means re-testing coverage everywhere your crews actually drive.
- It takes very little of your time. It starts with a recent bill. The audit work happens on the provider’s side. Your main job later on is confirming when a line should be canceled or a plan changed.
My part is choosing the right provider for your situation and staying involved afterward. I also check how they got to their savings number, not just the number. Anyone can quote a percentage. I want to see them show the same math on your bill.
If any of these five signs sound like your business, let’s take a look. A recent bill is all it takes to find out.