Wireless is the one telecom category where the bill is a list of people. People leave, change roles, swap devices and move between offices, and the carrier keeps billing every line until someone tells it to stop. In a company that has never audited its lines, it is common to find one line in ten with no user or no usage, and a few more on the wrong plan.
The audit takes an afternoon the first time and a quarter hour each quarter after that. Most of the work is getting the right report.
Get the line-level report
The invoice summary is useless for this. You need the carrier's line detail: one row per phone number with the user name on the account, the device, the plan, data and minutes used for the last three months, the features attached and whether the device is still being paid for. Every carrier portal exports it, usually as a spreadsheet, and the account team will send it if the portal will not.
Next to it put two lists from your own systems: the current employee list from HR and the device list from IT. The audit is a comparison of the three, and the carrier's line report is the one to load first because everything else is checked against it.
Five questions for every line
- Who has it? Match the number to a person on the HR list. A line with no match, or a match to someone who left, is an orphan.
- Is it used? Three months of zero data and zero minutes means nobody is carrying the phone, whatever the account says.
- Is the plan right? An unlimited plan on a line that uses a few hundred megabytes a month is money, and so is a capped plan that pays overage every month. Both move to a different tier.
- What is attached to it? International roaming, device protection, hotspot add-ons and third-party subscriptions billed to the line all persist long after the reason for them is gone.
- Is the device paid off? An installment plan that has finished but is still billing, or a device that is still being paid for on a line nobody uses, both need a decision.
What to do with what you find
Suspend orphan lines first, for thirty to ninety days, and cancel them once nobody has asked for them. Reassign spare lines to new starters instead of ordering new ones. Move plans to the tier the usage supports, and consider a shared data pool if the carrier offers one. Strip features nobody can name a reason for. Where a device still carries a balance, compare the payoff against the cost of keeping the line until the installment ends, and transfer the device to someone who needs one.
Keep the numbers of departed salespeople for a few months on a cheap plan with forwarding if customers still call them, and port or release the rest.
Keep it from drifting back
Add wireless to the leaver checklist so a line is suspended on the day someone leaves, not the quarter after. Give every new line an owner and a cost center the day it is ordered. Put a thirty-minute review on the calendar each quarter, with one named person responsible for it, and the afternoon never has to be repeated.
DemarcLabs loads the carrier's line report each month and keeps every line with its user, device, plan and cost. The line audit checks the lines against the latest wireless bill and flags the ones with no user, the suspended ones still billing, the numbers on the bill that are not on record, and the price changes, with the monthly amount at stake added up.