More and more companies are scrutinising their ICT costs as they pick up the pace of digital transformation. One area where most enterprises can identify opportunities for fast and painless cost savings is mobile voice and data services. In this area, costs have risen due to trends such as voice/data convergence, growing usage of 5G, and hybrid work.

Modern, cloud-based mobile expense management tools and practices can help your enterprise to simplify and automate cost optimisation processes. Such a solutions are fast to implement and begin delivering return on investment almost immediately. Here’s our beginner’s guide to mobile expense management:

What is mobile expense management?

Mobile expense management is a cutting edge subset of telecoms expense management—the tools and practices companies use to optimise telecoms costs and streamline management of telecoms services and vendors. Smarter mobile expense management tools help you keep track of service providers, devices and usage in real-time.

These solutions help you stay on top of costs and performance across thousands of mobile users and devices. They give you visibility into your mobile environment and simplify and automate deployment, monitoring, reporting and cost allocation across your mobile fleet and workforce. They are key for controlling mobile data and voice costs in real time.

Why do you need mobile expense management?

As you accelerate digital transformation and embrace hybrid ways of working in your business, it becomes more complex to keep ICT costs under control. Because of a lack of visibility into and control over your mobile environment, you could be spending 20% or more on mobile telecom costs than you need to.

Here are some reasons that smarter mobile expense management has become essential in this age of digital transformation:

• Many companies are finding that manually managing mobile expenses is too time consuming and inaccurate.
• It’s hard to keep track of and allocate voice and data usage across different cost centres. It’s especially challenging to differentiate business and personal use across charge-back and reimbursement models like BYOD (bring your own device) and COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled).
• Companies need smarter insight into mobile costs to inform contract negotiations with service providers and vendors.
• Wastage abounds in the absence of accurate ways to track costs. Underutilised infrastructure, unused subscriptions and services, and poorly selected service plans are common.
• The need to continuously optimise costs needs to be carefully balanced against the imperative of delivering the tools and services employees need to be productive and effective.

What are the benefits of mobile expense management?

Smarter mobile expense management empowers your IT and finance teams with a single centralised platform that gives them both granular and bird-eye perspectives on costs. This, in turn, empowers them to reduce wasteful usage, end bill shock and optimise both costs and business outcomes. Some benefits include:

• Simplify operations and save time: Mobile expense management automates internal cost recoveries and journals. That means your teams no longer need to wade through bills and invoices to track expenses and charge them to the correct cost centres.
• Guide end-user spending: Users get automated notifications when they’re approaching their usage limits throughout the month.
• Enhanced accuracy: A comprehensive solution will track the inventory of all mobile assets across the enterprise as well as monitor service costs. This makes it easier to spot billing irregularities, monitor contract expiration and eliminate unused mobile connections.
• Real-time insight: You have up-to-the-second visibility and control through the automation of IMACDs and service requests. You can monitor costs in real time.
• Enable digital transformation: Mobile expense management supports new ways of working and helps you to innovate. It is key to enabling remote and hybrid work, for example.
• Enforce policies: With real-time monitoring and use of mobile devices, you can track mobile device behaviour and ensure workers are adhering to policies and regulations wherever they go.

How do you get started with mobile expense management?

It’s important to recognise that mobile expense management isn’t just a tool, but a commitment to continuous optimisation and improvement. The first step towards more robust management of your mobile cost starts with finding a knowledgeable, vendor-independent partner to support your journey. It’s also key to get employee buy-in from the start.

*OneView Mobile Expense Management from Nebula is a smarter way to get real-time control over and visibility into mobile spending and performance. It’s part of our wider solution for technology expense management and FinOps. Keen to hear more about Nebula and OneView? Get in touch with our knowledgeable experts.