$85,679.20 Refund Check was secured for a client.
The vendor just couldn’t get it right!
All the LD usage on the main account was billed at 19 cents per minute — a competitive rate in 1967.
The usage was being picked from another carrier and the associated PIC codes were constantly slipping off to a system default DDD per minute rate of $.19.
When the usage rates were reviewed, a few calls were priced correctly, but most were not, creating a giant over billing every month.
WHY?
It was a typical vendor systems engineering problem. Sadly, we have seen it before (and are sure we will see it again).
Most of these billing systems are a concatenation of many systems and processes hooked together with the intent to create a customer bill every month. These systems are old and antiquated and often fail to produce accurate monthly billing.
You would have to be looking in the other direction not to find this billing error. A rate of 19 cents per minute glares like the Sun.
But, what about the smaller errors that more easily hide in your monthly bills? How often is this happening, and how do they get found and corrected?