Somewhere in your telco bill, there’s money leaking out. Probably a lot of it. Across the audits we run, most businesses are paying 20-40% more than they need to, and almost none of them know it. The waste doesn’t show up as a big scary number on page one. It’s spread across hundreds of line items on a 40-page invoice that nobody reads past the total.

After enough of these audits you stop being surprised, because the money is almost always hiding in the same five places.

1. Services nobody uses anymore

We call them orphan services. A SIM card in a drawer somewhere, still on a plan. Data links to a site you closed in 2023. A fax line. An actual fax line.

Carriers don’t stop billing you when you stop using something. Someone at your end has to notice and cancel it, and in any organisation bigger than about twenty people, nobody owns that job. Staff leave, sites close, projects wrap up, and the services they needed just keep quietly billing. The typical business we audit is carrying four to six of these at any given time. Individually they look like rounding errors. Add them up over a year and they’re often the biggest single chunk of recoverable waste we find.

2. People on the wrong plans

The executives are almost always on the most expensive mobile plans, not because they use the most data, but because someone provisioned by seniority instead of usage. Meanwhile the field staff who actually chew through data are on capped plans, copping overage fees every single month.

Nobody did this deliberately. Plans get set up once, usually years ago, and the structure just freezes while the actual usage drifts. You end up subsidising people who barely touch their phones and penalising the ones who depend on them.

You can’t see any of this from the bill total, which is why it survives. Finding it means matching every service against what that person actually used, month by month. When we did that for one client, a third of their fleet moved down a tier and their overage charges halved.

3. Contracts that renewed themselves

Telco contracts auto-renew, and they rarely renew in your favour. The discounts you negotiated apply to the initial term. When it lapses, the carrier rolls you into a new period at whatever the standard rate happens to be. The renewal notice went to someone’s inbox eighteen months ago. They may not even work there anymore.

Ask yourself: could anyone in your business, right now, name the expiry date of every telco contract you hold? If the answer is no, you’re negotiating from the back foot on every single one of them, and the carrier knows it.

4. Paying twice for the same thing

This one sounds like it shouldn’t happen: two internet services, from two providers, delivering to the same site, both being paid. It happens constantly. One team orders an NBN connection, another team orders fibre a year later, and nobody checks what’s already in the building. We’ve walked into sites running three separate connections billed to the same cost centre.

You won’t catch it by reading invoices, because the descriptions don’t match. One bill says “Ethernet Access”, the other says “Fibre Data Link”, and unless you know they’re the same thing, both look legitimate. It takes a proper site-by-site inventory to untangle, which is exactly what our Telco Health Check was built for.

5. Billing errors, in the carrier’s favour

Carrier billing systems are enormous and they make mistakes: rate changes that don’t apply, promotional credits that vanish after a few months, charges calculated on the wrong base. Not fraud, just complex billing systems making mistakes, and the mistakes are rarely in your favour.

Most finance teams pay what the invoice says, because disputing line items on a telco bill is miserable work with no obvious payoff. The carriers are counting on that. When we check invoices against the actual contract terms, the errors we recover are frequently worth more than our entire engagement.

Why it always comes back

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. Even if you found and fixed all of the above tomorrow, in eighteen months half of it would be back. Staff change, new services get ordered, another contract quietly renews. A one-off cleanup is a payday, not a cure. Keeping the waste out for good takes ongoing governance: someone reconciling the bills, challenging the anomalies and watching the renewal dates, every month, as a discipline. That’s the unglamorous part of what we do, and it’s where the long-term money is.

Want to know your number?

Every business described above believed their telco spend was under control, right up until someone looked. If you’d like to know what’s hiding in yours, book a free Telco Health Check. We go through your bills, contracts and usage, and give you a straight answer about what you’re overpaying and how to stop. No obligation, and you keep your existing carriers.