The Value of TEM for IT Finance

31 May 2018 | Posted by Cass Information Systems, Inc.

When you’re running a department, a key frustration is seeing your budget disappear down what can feel like a black hole of running costs and mundane expenses. You know that making real change would deliver savings to both time and costs, but releasing the initial funds seems like a pipe dream. It’s a catch-22, but significant savings might be easier to find than you expect.

Effective telecom expense management (TEM) can deliver considerable cost reductions and eradicate many of the most common headaches and pain-points of an IT finance department. It does this in variety of ways, chief among them: increased visibility, improved user behavior, and uncovering and delivering real savings.

Increased Visibility 

When TEM is working as it should, you get unprecedented clarity – you can see exactly how your actuals compare to your budgets. Furthermore, you gain visibility into where IT spend is going, in unprecedented detail.

Download your complimentary copy of the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Telecom  Expense Management Services.

You are able to precisely allocate charges for all telecom expenses across your organization’s cost-centers and create detailed, and accurate, reporting to deliver to cost-center managers so they know what they’re buying.

And when telecom spend is understood and properly allocated, you can wave goodbye to the unexpected, sometimes middle of the night, phone calls from business unit heads irate at an unexpected charge resulting from faulty reporting.

When you capture a more accurate understanding of individual departmental spend, you gain concrete evidence to justify costs and a powerful driver to impel better end-user behavior – which leads us to…

More Responsible Users 

No one knows better than the IT finance manager or controller how steeply the costs of unreasonable user behavior can rack up. However, knowing it’s occurring and knowing exactly where it’s occurring are often two very different things. Managing corporate mobility at the enterprise level is complex and strenuous, and today's BYOD culture only adds to the sprawling network of devices and costs. TEM can pinpoint exactly where spend is going, for an in-depth view of who is using what. 

With great visibility comes great power. In addition to enabling you to see exactly where your budget is most strained, good TEM will include, and help you build, policies that encourage compliance and good end-user behavior.

Real Savings

A good TEM service doesn't stop at just illuminating your telecom spend or making recommendations. Rather your provider will work to deliver significant savings – through audit services, sourcing services, reporting, bill dispute and payment, and visibility, as well as the cost reductions to be gained from improving user behavior.

You should see impressive cost reductions from the beginning of your engagement, but the best TEM services will be continual, looking at spend across the entire telecoms lifecycle to ensure that you keep on achieving deep cuts to your spend, year after year.

The level of cost reduction is often more than enough to make that wish-list transformation project an attainable goal and to empower you to stop spending all your money on running the business and use it to transform the business instead.

Automated Financial Management

Today's best TEM vendors combine excellent service with powerful automation.

Your vendor can automate the collection and assignment of telecom charges to the lowest level of detail and integrate with your general ledger to automate the appropriate entries.

It also enables you to automatically generate detailed reports for every cost center manager, giving complete clarity to the costs hitting their budgets and eliminating many of the inquiries that consume and distract your team. 

Managing the financials of an IT department can feel like a thankless task, but the right partners will lift your burdens and place you firmly back in control. Good TEM has the potential to be truly transformational for IT finance.

With more than a century of steady growth, Cass is a uniquely reliable vendor of TEM services. We understand your pain-points and we know how to relieve them, with the experience and stability needed to be your most dependable partner.

Learn more about today’s telecom expense management landscape with the help of Gartner. Their independent analysis of the market is an invaluable source for IT and finance professionals. Download your copy of the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Telecom Expense Management Services today.

New call-to-action

Topics: TEM

Get regular Telecom roundups direct to your inbox.