MBG Article
Q&A with an MBG Senior Billing Analyst
MBG's eMonitor sat down for a quick Q&A session with Kathleen Daly, one of MBG's senior billing analysts to get an "in the trenches" perspective on telecom invoice processing and understand why electronic data is so beneficial to the processing of invoices.
What are the advantages to using electronic data versus paper invoices?
You get much more detailed information with electronic data, which means you get a better idea of your monthly usage. With paper it’s hard to get the whole picture on a month-to-month basis. In the case of electronic data, you can easily compare your spend instead of wondering, “Why did my costs go up?”. Instead you can immediately analyze the data and it becomes more of an efficient process. And it’s an automatic delivery versus waiting for the mail-man to deliver the invoice. This knowledge can also be used to lower costs associated with unused assets.
Decreasing reliance on paper helps the environment, which is essentially the point of “going green”but can you tell me anything else that makes electronic invoices better?
It eliminates how much time you spend on analyzing invoices so you can dedicate time elsewhere. The MBG system can go through and determine…’this is right’…’this is new’…, therefore you don’t spend hours looking over discrepancies. The MBG system scrubs data for you versus trying to figure it out with paper, which can be a challenge to say the least.
If an error or dispute occurs, is it easier to identify with electronic invoices?
Yes. With electronic data you can build a "billed inventory" which provides a database of a company's telecom services including taxes, USOC’s, so you can match it automatically against the current invoice to identify errors.......paper does not allow for easy error identification nor help with keeping a complete inventory. In fact, paper can sometime make it worse.
With paper invoices are you more likely to lose track of data?
Definitely. Because you generally can’t remember what happened a few months ago, unless you write it down, and by doing that, you are wasting time looking for that information---electronic data allows for quick location and helps with supplying an audit trail.
Everyone knows that utilizing electronic invoices, a company can gain better control of their telecom spend, but do you believe it’s also beneficial on your end to process electronically for outsourced clients?
Absolutely. It eliminates manual data entry by streamlining the process which equals a reduction in errors through the process. It also makes MBG's ability to process invoices efficient, allowing me and my department to get into the details in analyzing a client's bills. And best of all, no one gets paper cuts!
Kathleen Daly is a senior billing analyst at MBG Expense Management, responsible for managing a team that handles invoice processing for some of MBG's outsourced clients.
