In a time of slow growth, one of the smarter ways a company can increase profits is by reducing its cost base. But after years of cost-cutting, many businesses are running out of quick, easy ways to reduce expenses. One of the areas that is often overlooked is telecom expenses, which have surged as companies have accelerated digital transformation.

Cutting edge mobile expense management solutions and practices offer your business an assured way to reduce costs without negatively affecting your productivity, efficiency or customer experience. While these solutions aren’t a silver bullet for all the challenges businesses face today, they can offer near-instant, actionable ways to save money.

Here’s our guide to five ways mobile expense management can help your business to operate more profitably:

Improve visibility: You can’t manage what you don’t measure continuously and accurately. Smarter mobile expense management gives you insight into telecom spending, so that you can benchmark costs, draw up accurate budgets and forecasts, and ultimately take a proactive approach to optimising your environment.

Simplify and automate operations: Cutting edge expense management solutions can turn cumbersome manual processes for monitoring spending, allocating costs and reconciling transactions into a relic of the past. These solutions will free up hours of time for line managers, the finance team, and the IT department by automating processes associated with tracking and reporting on telecom costs.

Improve cost allocation and recovery: With the right tools and practices in place, your business will be able to more accurately track and allocate mobile spending. These smarter solutions ensure that you can track expenses and charge them to the correct cost centres. They also help you to track employees’ personal versus business spending for more accurate reimbursement in BYOD models.

Enforce spending levels: Smarter mobile expense management empowers your end-users and makes them more accountable for their spending on voice and data services. They can, for example, receive automated notifications when they’re approaching their usage limits throughout the month. They’ll thus be more aware of what their mobile usage is costing the company and will adjust their behaviour accordingly—by, for instance, avoiding out of bundle data usage and using Wi-Fi when available.

Reduce wasted spend: In our experience, around 20% of the average enterprise’s telecom spending is wasted. We have found that smarter tools and best practices can reduce wasted spend down to as little as 3% of the annual total. Reasons for wasted spend include unused or sub-optimal contracts, end-user abuse of company resources, service provider overbilling, and a lack of a cost optimisation culture.

Smarter practices save money and boost margins

Companies that take a proactive approach to manage telecom costs can save significant amounts of money—an average of 19% on their mobile voice costs and between 25% and 60% on mobile data costs. These savings can be used to innovate, grow the business and improve the bottom line.

1Nebula’s knowledgeable team of FinOps and DevOps experts can help you to simplify your mobile and cloud environments. Contact us to learn how we can help you to adopt smarter cloud expense management and mobile expense management practices as well as accelerate your digital transformation and cloud migration programmes.