How to prepare for a Telecom audit in three short steps
It isn’t exactly a secret that the key to any successful telecoms expense management (TEM) business is regular auditing. But if the very thought of a looming audit is enough to make you break into a sweat then read on, because it is much easier than you think to prepare for an audit and when it comes to TEM, preparation is everything.
In a perfect world, you would conduct your own in-house audit every year as a form of self-policing and crisis management. After all, wouldn’t you rather stumble across that gaping hole in your accounts when you can still do something about it?
“You should find that you are able to reconcile your data without difficulty. If not, you need to ask yourself why.”
It may seem like a massive undertaking, but it is entirely possible to prepare your business for an audit quickly and effectively by following these three short steps:
- Gather together your inventory
Absolutely all of it. Pull together the various inventories of your different businesses and dig into your records so that you have a full catalogue of everything that you currently hold. Then contact your suppliers and ask them to give you your “book-of-business”. Don’t forget to include any past-due invoices or credit notes during this stage – you cannot be too thorough when it comes to audit preparation. Between your own records and your supplier records you should have a pretty solid sense of your current holdings. Regardless of what some suppliers might claim, the onus is on them to provide you with a full list of what they are billing you for. After all, if they don’t know what you have with them, how can they invoice you correctly?
- Calculate your spend
Set up a meeting with your company’s finance director and ask them to provide you with the last 12 months of spend from your ledger. This will form the base line of your outgoings and should offer some insight into your spending patterns throughout the year. This may be a good time to go through your ledger with the finance director to identify any errors or erroneous charges and straighten things out.
- What do you know today?
Go through all your internal databases and accounting systems in order to get an up-to-the-minute sense of your financial activity over the past 12 months. You may have a sophisticated internal tracking system, or a ‘pen and paper’ approach to invoices, purchase orders and deliveries but the more information you have at your disposal, the better. This is the final stage of your audit preparations, and should help fill in any gaps in your records as well as flushing out any major discrepancies in your accounts.
Anticipating an audit
Once you’ve completed these three steps, you are ready for your audit! You should find that you are able to reconcile your data without difficulty. If not, you need to ask yourself why.
The more you do this, the easier it will become and you will start to build up an impeccable archive of your accounts. Make internal auditing a part of your annual business plan, so that you are never caught off guard. Frequent audits make your business stronger and help you to identify any weaknesses in the system before they start causing major problems.
It may be worth assembling a team of key stakeholders who take responsibility for the various stages of audit preparation each year. These could include:
- A sponsor who can lead the audit and support the team through diligent management.
- An engineering resource which is able to respond to any technical design questions.
- A Service Delivery resource which tracks and manages all information which has been physically logged into the network, and confirms that services both exist and are in use.
- A financial resource which can confirm that any identified savings are being credited to your accounts.
If you follow these three steps, preparing for an audit should not be too labour-intensive, although it will take time. The alternative is to install a bespoke TEM solution which tracks all your financial activities, essentially performing the audit preparation for you on an on-going basis. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can pull up all the information you need at a moment’s notice, cutting back on the time and energy which you spend on audit preparations each year. What’s more, a streamlined internal TEM system can help you to identify any potential issues almost immediately, so you can sort them out right there and then. A properly utilised TEM solution could actually make you money in terms of SLA management claims as well as the more well-known route of saving you money through invoice reconciliation.
Conclusion
Once you have these systems in place, your records will be in such perfect shape that you will be practically begging for an audit.
Temforce is a provider of Professional Auditing Services with a difference: When we have groomed your network and squeezed every saving possible from it, we leave you with the tool we used to achieve those savings – why? So that you don’t need to audit your network ever again.
Is your team managing your telecom environment efficiently? Read our post “3 ways to know you and your team are on top of TEM” to find out.