Cellular Phone Administration - Invoices, Usage, etc.

[jbicking]

I am the Corporate Cellular Phone Administrator at my company and I'm wanting to find out how many others do the same kind of work (reviewing all monthly cellular phone bills, tracking usage, reporting usage to user's manager, handling issues with cellular equipment, working with vendor to get discounted pricing for volume business, etc).

Wanting to set up a "network" of sorts made up of individuals who do this kind of work in order to get new information/ideas and also to see how each person does their job (i.e., do you use a database or Excel to track usage)? If anyone else is interested in this, please respond. Thanks!

Jo Ann

 

[PeaveyPhones]

Jo Ann,
I manage the cell phones (and PBX) at my company.
We have 10 Cingular phones and 20 Sprint PCS phones.
I use Excel to document each users activity, ie
Name, phone number, ESN number, ativation date, contract term, minutes used each month and dollars spent each month.
Putting it in a spreadsheet makes it easy to see the trends.
I negotiated pooled minute plans with both carriers that reduced our cost by 40%.

Richad


The unexamined life is not worth living; Socrates

 

[jbicking]

I've been using an Access database to track all of that information. We have approximately 90 cellular phones with Veirzon, AT&T and Nextel. I send monthly reports out to each user's manager indicating that the minute usage has been as well as cost. Do you do any reporting to user's managers?

 

[PeaveyPhones]

I make copies of a few select users and send those to the their managers. The President of the company gets a copies of all invoices.

Richard

The unexamined life is not worth living; Socrates

 

[Toni269]

I have about 30 phones with Verizon and 40 with AT&T and I did the same thing as Richard, I put them all on pooled minutes plan and it has saved me! It was nearly impossible for me to manage a different calling plan for each user and predict their usage.

I would love to be able to copy bills and give them to managers instead of tracking in Excel, butI can't do that because I got burned one time a user got the corp account number and gave himself a calling plan upgrade and ordered phones for his "gangsta" friends and it was a pain to deal with the fraud investigation. Using a sharpie to block out the account number on 80 page bills just get's me high.

Since then I have password protection on all accounts before a new order or change can be made on all Wireless and LD accounts.

I would like to track trending & usage in excel but manually entering on a spreadsheet takes a while. Are you putting in just the minutes used, total minutes or just money spent? Would be interesting to see the excel format and how it's tracked. Some type of database software that could automatically generate reports for you would be even better.

I'm glad you started this thread, seems we are all in the same boat.

Toni

 

[PeaveyPhones]

Toni,
Thank God no gangsta's here, just good ole boys and gals from Mississippi.
I only include minutes that go against the pool, that is I exclude phone to phone and nights/weekends.
I have to check each persons usage anyway and I know that I will be questioned about the trending so I just go ahead and take the few extra minutes to record it on the spreadsheet. This also provides a cell phone directory.
I record all my invoices the same way. Each vendor has it's own Excel file. Simple columns with account number, description of service, invoice number, dollar amount, date I sent it to AP. As I said I use Excel. Jo Ann uses Access which, as I understand it, is Excel-on-steroids/database.
I'll email you copies of the way I do it if you like.
I heard AT&T is for sale. Any concerns?

Richard

The unexamined life is not worth living; Socrates

 

[jbicking]

For each line of service we have, I use Access to track the user name, manager name, phone make/model, ESN/HEX/DEC numbers, plan minute allowance, whether or not the user has messaging features that cost extra (and how much the cost is if they do), plan cost, vendor, vendor account number, number of actual minutes used, actual invoice cost, any extra charges (i.e., directory assistance, overage fees, etc.). I also have a "Comments" memo field in Access in which I type any comments (regarding plan changes, phone swaps, etc.). When I'm preparing my reports for management, I run a query of the specific vendor account number and month I want to report, then copy and paste that info into an email to send to the manager. If a manager needs call detail, I scan the appropriate sheets and email the .pdf file to the manager.

I've found that going through the invoices has been really good for our company, because there have been numerous times where I've found we've been charged for something we shouldn't have been. When our largest cellular carrier switched billing systems last October, they automatically put all 60 of our phones under contract (they weren't under contract prior to this). We had a few people leave and when I disconnected their phone (no one else to reassign it to), we were charged a $175 early term fee. It took four months to get those charges reversed and the remainder of our phones taken out of contract.

Our accounts with the carriers are all password protected, but I've seen instances where somehow something gets added to the account (i.e., night and weekend minutes that cost extra). The user doesn't know the password, and lo and behold, adding that feature extends the contract.

No gangsta's here, just lots of users who have no regard for their monthly plan allowance. :-(

We use Nextel for out IT Department and those phones do have pooled minutes and it's saved us numerous times. Our other users (sales and execs mostly) have single-rate, national plans and we haven't been able to get pooled minutes for those folks. We just had someone use over 300 minutes OVER their monthly allowance. Ouch!

I believe that Cingular bought AT&T Wireless. Only change I've seen so far is that AT&T now extends their nighttime minutes, so they now begin @ 7:00 if you have a price plan priced at (I think) $39.99 or higher.

Sorry for the long post.. You two are the first I've seen who do anything with the cellular invoices - most companies just have A/P pay the invoices without looking at them. I'd like to have like an unofficial user's group or something of people who deal with the vendors and go through the invoices - there's a lot more to it than people realize.

 

[PeaveyPhones]

Talking about people going over...
I had a user, at another company, that went over by several hundred minutes. When I asked him if he realized that it cost us a lot of money for those extra minutes, he said he thought it was a "perk". I informed the young man that it was not.

I check all of my invoices. My boss called me in yesterday to ask about our BellSouth bill which has about 30 or so seperate accounts. I was able to explain each one just because I'm so familiar with it.

Richard

The unexamined life is not worth living; Socrates

 

[Toni269]

Richard, my email address is toni@sdaug.com

I've had a user over several THOUSAND minutes on my end - a single bill over $500.00 in one month, but the month before or month after will be like only 200 minutes. The thousand minute month he said he was talking with clients but after looking at the bill, the calls are all in the middle of the night (after midnight).

One guy uses his phone over 3000 minutes a month and he keeps calling me to tell me that his cell phone won't work!! That's 50 HOURS of talk time a month.

One guy called me to ask if he has "roaming" on his plan becuase his phone says 'roam' on the display.... after much questioning about his current location I found out he was in Canada!

Oh, did I mention all three of those stories are about the same guy? He drives me CRAZY.

 

[jbicking]

What I like is the guy who came up to me and said, "See this D on the display? How do I make that go away?" The "D" he was referring to is actually the D for DIGITAL. He then asked me if I knew his voicemail password, because he had forgotten it.

Then there's the guy who thought he'd clean his phone by using soap and water. He then wondered why his phone wasn't working.

My email is jbicking@omniumworldwide.com I'd be interested in keeping in touch with both of you - so we can bounce new ideas/problems off of each other. What do you think?

Jo Ann

 

[PeaveyPhones]

Toni,
"...he was talking with clients but after looking at the bill, the calls are all in the middle of the night."

So you provide a cell phone for Bill Clinton? Doah!

The most I've seen is 2700 minutes. I trying to figure out how a person could be the phone that much, so I went down to talk to the fella. There he was at his desk, ... USING THE CELL PHONE! It's kinda like the "toll free number", people seem to think its all free.

Richard

The unexamined life is not worth living; Socrates

 

[Toni269]

Oh, yeah! On that same subject, we have people that work from home and this is what they get:

Home office line installed
Cell Phone
VoIP Phone
Toll Free number
Laptop
Blackberry (or Blueberry, Dingleberry or Crackberry, whatever you like to call them)

I don't understand why management thinks that a person working from HOME would need both a laptop, cell phone, home phone and blackberry!

I get e-mail responses from people working from home "from their wireless Blackberry handheld".... (yeah, like there at home... working!)

Oh and yes, they think that they need a calling plan on both the cell phone and the blackberry, that takes the monthly amount from $50 per month to $100 per month, plus the data plan it's like $150 per month!!!

Why not just use the blackberry and transfer the cell phone number to it? "boo-hoo, because the blackberry is too hard to use, sniff

 

[jbicking]

We had a user who went just slightly into Mexico and had her work cellular with her. Her phone was cloned while she was in Mexico and there ended up being over $25,000 worth of fraudulent charges on our Verizon bill.

 

[Toni269]

Did she loose her phone there? Or did she just have it powered on there? I've heard that they won't work there unless you have a special International plan. How did Verizon resolve it?

 

[jbicking]

It was an Startac (7868) and it was just powered on. It took several months and Verizon finally agreed to write it off because they could tell what happened. Needless to say, we don't let her out of the city anymore.

What do you do in the event of someone breaking their phone? We had someone who was a disgruntled employee. He turned in his two week notice on his last day, he threw his Startac phone against the wall and smashed it. We have people who go through antennas (antennae?) like most people change socks. We have a policy that states "reasonable care must be taken of all company property, including laptops, cell phones, etc...."

What about driving while talking on a cellular? I'm sure there's some kind of corporate liability if someone talking on a company cell phone about company business gets into an accident. Does your company have any written policies about that?

 

[Toni269]

I tried to go that whole route about driving on the cell phone policy and liability for breaking the phones and no one would cooperate. Managers are the biggest offenders and the ones who make the rules.

In the old days when someone broke their phone I would charge them the deductable and have the cell phone insurance recover it. But as I said they are managers and they got tired of playing by the rules.

If someone breaks something, I just make sure I have spares on hand and swap it out. My other HUGE issue is them loosing their acessorries. I just buy what is needed and charge it back to their departments. I cancelled all of the insurance on the cell phone accounts. I found it cheaper to purchase 1-2 phones per month than to pay 3.99 per month per user for the insurance + deductable.

 

[jbicking]

Fortunately, I too keep a lot of spare phones around in the event that I need to swap one out.

These people here go through belt clips like you wouldn't believe. Unfortunately, all expenditures for cellular phones (service, accessories, phones, etc.), hit my budget - something that is not widely known by the users. Not something I like. It's interesting.. When someone goes over their minutes and I alert the user's manager that we have to pay overage, they get all nervous and say, "I didn't budget anything for that..." What, like I did???

What's your yearly cell phone expense - roughly?

 

[Toni269]

Between both carriers: AT&T Wireless TDMA, AT&T Wireless GSM, Verizon Wireless including monthly acces, and hardware costs (cell phones, blackberries, & all accessories) I will probably spend close to 80K if not more.