Getting mobile telecoms costs under control is becoming increasingly challenging in the face of higher adoption of technologies such as 5G, the demands of hybrid working, and the imperative of digital transformation. Some of the common pain points include abuse or wastage of company resources, inaccurate bills, and a proliferation of unused contracts and services.

Most companies that address these issues can dramatically slash their mobile telecoms bills without impacting productivity or end-user experience. But to effectively tackle these problems, companies will need to put in place smarter tools and processes that help them track and manage services, assets and expenses in real time.

Mobile expense management solutions and services help your business to gain a 360-degree view of your total mobile spend. This, in turn, enables you to identify cost-saving opportunities as well as automate many of the process involved in managing mobile expenses.

Here is a five step guide to using cutting edge mobile expense management tools and practices to slash your mobile telecom costs:

1. Gain visibility into costs

Mobile expense management offers a smarter, more standardised process for tracking telecoms costs in your business. Once you implement a cutting edge solution, you will be able to gain comprehensive breakdowns of your costs by dimensions such as cost centre, service provider or vendor, and service (e.g. voice, data, local, roaming). This will give you insight into where your budget is going.

2. Use the baseline to optimise spending

Now that you have a baseline for telecoms costs in your organisation, you can start mining that data for opportunities for cost optimisation. Most companies that implement mobile expense management find low hanging fruit in terminating contracts that aren’t being used, spotting inefficient or wasted spending such as out of bundle data purchases, and preventing abuses such as excessive personal calls or internet usage on company mobile contracts.

3. Support a cost-conscious culture

Today’s mobile expense management solutions will include tools to help your employees monitor and manage their own spending. Automated alerts, for example, could be used to notify them when they’re about to breach certain spending thresholds. Or they could use a mobile app to track monthly mobile spend and stay within set limits via live usage tracking. This can help to create a more cost-conscious company culture.

4. Simplify operations through automation

One of the underappreciated ways companies can save money with mobile expense management is by automating processes. A good solution will streamline cost claims and reporting for employees, making it easy for them to track their usage of company resources, split their personal and business expenses, and file their claims or expense reports. It will also make it simple for administrators to track expenses and charge them to the correct cost centres, without a lot of manual work.

5. Move towards real time cost control and optimisation

A cutting edge mobile expense management solution enables you to monitor and control mobile data and voice costs in real time. You can track individual users, teams, and entire departments by identifying usage trends as well as prevent overspending and bill shock. You’re empowered to automate monitoring, management and tracking of costs across the mobile ecosystem through the implementation of powerful reporting, budgeting and forecasting tools.

The knowledgeable team at 1Nebula has helped many leading enterprises to implement smarter ways of managing their telecoms costs. We also have deep expertise in mobile device management, FinOps, DevOps and digital transformation. Get in touch to learn how we can help you accelerate your growth and simplify operations.