Most TEM evaluations go wrong in the same way. The demo shows a dashboard, the dashboard looks good, and nobody asks what is underneath it. Six months later the platform is producing confident charts from an inventory nobody validated, against invoices it only stored in summary.
This guide is the set of questions that prevents that. If you want the definition first, start with what is telecom expense management.
Start by naming the problem you are solving
TEM platforms are bought for four different reasons, and they are not equally good at all four. Decide which one is yours before you look at any product, because it changes what matters.
Recovery. You believe you are being overbilled and want the money back. The platform needs line-level invoice data, contract rates as structured data, and a dispute workflow. Reporting depth matters less than reconciliation accuracy.
Allocation. Finance needs telecom split by cost centre, site, or GL code and cannot build it by hand. The platform needs a flexible allocation model, a clean inventory, and an audit trail that survives questions.
Control. Services are ordered and disconnected without anyone tracking it, and the record drifts. You need MACD workflow tracked through to billing verification, not just an expense view.
Visibility. Leadership wants to know what is spent and on what. This is the easiest to satisfy, and the one where a shallow product looks best in a demo.
A platform strong at recovery may be weak at allocation. Rank these before the first call.
The seven questions that actually separate platforms
1. Do you store invoice data at line level, for every carrier?
This is the single most revealing question. Many systems ingest a summary or an account-level total, which is enough to chart spend and useless for finding the charge that should not be there.
Ask to see a real invoice in the system, expanded to individual lines, with rate, quantity, service identifier, and tax treatment visible. If the answer involves an attached PDF, the data is not in the platform.
2. Can inventory and invoices be reconciled automatically, on carrier identifiers?
Reconciliation is the core mechanic of TEM. It only works if the platform can match a billing line to a service record using the identifiers the carrier actually prints, which are inconsistent between carriers and sometimes between products from the same carrier.
Ask what happens to a billing line with no matching inventory record, and what happens to an inventory record with no matching billing line. Both should produce an exception. The second one is how you find a service you are paying for that nobody knows about, and it is the question weaker platforms answer badly.
3. Are contract terms structured, or attached?
A contract stored as a PDF cannot validate anything. To check that the billed rate matches the contracted rate, the platform needs rates, effective dates, terms, minimum commitments, and notice periods as fields.
Ask how a renegotiated rate propagates. If updating a rate means re-uploading a document and telling an analyst, contract validation is manual work with a database in front of it.
4. Is MACD tracked through to billing verification?
Order management is where inventory decays. The test is what “complete” means for a disconnect.
Weak answer: complete when the request is sent, or when the carrier acknowledges it. Strong answer: complete when a subsequent invoice confirms the charge has stopped.
The gap between those two definitions is where the most expensive error in telecom lives, the service that was cancelled on paper and never stopped billing.
5. Who does the work?
Establish precisely where the vendor’s responsibility ends:
- Who reviews the exceptions the platform generates?
- Who files a dispute with the carrier?
- Who follows it up at 30 and 60 days?
- Who confirms the credit appeared on a later invoice?
If the answer to any of these is your team, that is a real cost and it belongs in the comparison. Software that surfaces two hundred exceptions a month and has nobody to work them produces a backlog, not savings.
6. What access do you need, and how is it scoped?
Any provider retrieving invoices or making changes needs access to your carrier accounts, usually through a letter of agency. This is a security and governance decision, not a formality.
Ask what the LOA permits, whether read-only billing access is available separately from ordering rights, how access is logged, and how it is revoked. A provider that cannot answer this crisply has not thought about it.
7. Can you leave?
The platform is meant to be your system of record. Confirm it stays yours.
Ask for a full export in a documented format, including inventory, contracts, normalised invoice history, allocation rules, and dispute history. If leaving means rebuilding the inventory from carrier data, the record belongs to the vendor.
Understanding the pricing models
Three models dominate, and the differences are large enough to change the ranking of otherwise similar products.
Percentage of spend under management. Typically a low single-digit percentage of the telecom spend the provider manages. It aligns the vendor with finding savings, and it is easy to justify because the fee scales with the bill. The obvious tension: the fee grows as your spend grows, including growth that has nothing to do with the vendor’s work. Check whether the percentage applies to gross or net spend, and whether it is recalculated as savings land.
Per unit. A fee per line, circuit, or service record per month. Predictable and easy to forecast. Check the definition of a unit carefully, because an inventory heavy with low-cost services can price out badly under a flat per-unit fee.
Spend band subscription. A flat monthly price tied to a range of managed spend. The most predictable model and the easiest to compare, provided the band boundaries and what happens when you cross one are clear. This is the model Vigilis publishes, at vigilis.io/pricing.
Whichever model, ask two questions: what is included versus billed as a project, and what happens to the fee in year two. Implementation, carrier onboarding, historical audits, and custom integrations are the usual extras.
What implementation really involves
Vendors quote implementation timelines as a single number. That number is mostly not about software.
The real path is: sign the LOA, submit it to each carrier, wait for carrier portal access, retrieve historical invoices, normalise them, build the baseline inventory, reconcile the inventory against billing, and resolve the differences. Carrier access is the long pole and it is largely outside any vendor’s control. Several weeks per carrier is normal.
Ask for the timeline broken down per carrier, and ask what you are expected to provide. The honest answer usually includes a site list, existing contracts, and someone internal who can answer questions about which services are still in use. A vendor who says they need nothing from you is describing a data import, not an implementation.
Failure modes worth checking for
The inventory nobody validated. The platform builds inventory from carrier billing, which means anything billed incorrectly becomes inventory. Ask how the baseline gets validated against reality rather than against the invoice.
Savings claimed but not banked. Ask whether reported savings mean identified, disputed, or credited. Only the third is money. A report of “$400,000 identified” can coexist with almost nothing recovered.
Reporting that cannot be traced. If a chart cannot be drilled to the invoice lines behind it, it cannot be defended when a department disputes its allocation.
One-time cleanup sold as a programme. The first audit always finds the most, because it is clearing years of accumulated error. Ask what the second year looks like, and what keeps the record accurate once the backlog is gone.
A short evaluation checklist
Take this to a demo:
- Show me one real invoice, expanded to line level.
- Show me a billing line with no matching inventory record.
- Show me an inventory record with no matching billing line.
- Show me where the contracted rate lives, and show it being compared to a billed rate.
- Show me a disconnect, from request to the invoice that proves it stopped.
- Show me a dispute, from filing to the credit landing.
- Show me the export.
A platform that can do all seven live is a system of record. One that can only do the first and the last is a reporting layer with an import.
Related reading
- What is telecom expense management, for the discipline and its boundaries.
- Telecom inventory management, which is the foundation everything above depends on.
- Outsourced TEM, if the answer to “who does the work” is that you would rather it was not your team.
- Vigilis vs Tangoe and Vigilis vs Calero, for sourced feature comparisons.