TELECOM EXPENSE MANAGEMENT COMPANIES - GOOD OR BAD?

We have evaluated few TEMCO services and here are my personal conclusions.
First of all it is 100% hosted service. Should you drop this service all your information becomes inaccessible. None of them offered raw data in any open format besides normal reports and billing sheets.

The second is the cost. Despite the fact that TEMCO can provide pretty good level of customization and analytics, the cost was equal to a salary of a full-time employee who will use a standard set of office applications to produce any sort of custom reports and perform analysis based not on hard coded set of rules only, but common sense and human intelligence.

The next issue was the quotation process. The cost of the solution was closely tied up to telecom spending budget. There was no any other formal rules for it in all cases. Amount of processing for 1000 phone lines in 10 accounts with all sorts of features and long distance or 10 DS3 circuits is really different while cost of services will be about the same. The invoice for the first case will look like a medium size parcel, while the second one will contain just a couple of pages.

In ideal world I would like to buy a standalone product similar to Turbo-Tax. Pay subscription to receive latest updates about taxes, fees and etc. and load as many data as I want. I will consider even tiered solution which can handle 1 account, 10 accounts, 100 and unlimited. In this case all information is mine to keep should I stop using solution. All costs are determined and known ahead of time and there will be no surprise like TEMCO increasing cost of services because I doubled telecom spending by upgrading T1 lines to DS3