How to manage the telecom expenses of a remote workforce

The global COVID-19 pandemic together with the national lockdown has caused many new challenges for South African businesses – especially for those that are not used to having a remote workforce.

One of these challenges is runaway business data and other telecoms expenses. Many companies have been forced to enable their employees to continue working from home by providing them with SIM cards and Wi-Fi dongles.

As a result, many companies are left with high telecoms expenditure and little control over it.

• Click here to find out more about Visibill

To help companies gain visibility over their telecom expenditure in these unprecedented times and to help them put their telecom expenses back in their own hands, software development firm Rysis Software offers the perfect solution – Visibill.

Visibill is a Telecom Expense Management System developed by Rysis Software in South Africa and as the name suggests gives visibility into your company’s telecom expenses.

It is designed as a cloud-based web application and enables businesses to control, manage, and understand their telecom expense situation from anywhere.

According to Jonathan Bell, Managing Director at Rysis Software and creator of the Visibill product, Visibill makes it easy for companies to make sense of the large amounts of data they use.

The reason for this is because it is presented in an easy-to-use system, which clearly shows where their spend is allocated, allowing them to take action on telecom expenses as needed.

The system is setup to integrate directly with South African mobile operators, giving administrators full visibility into the expenditure of employees’ SIM cards with regards to their daily data, voice, and/or SMS usage.

Visibill features

• Cloud-based web application: Because the system is a cloud-based web application, each client can access the system with their own URL. As the system is hosted off-site, there is no need for the company to install any software or IT infrastructure on personal computers to implement or use the system.
• Create usage notifications: With Visibill you can set up usage notifications via SMS or email to notify you once usage has reached a preset threshold and prevent unwanted expenditure. Setting up usage notifications is useful, as users don’t have to log in to keep updated of their usage. This way businesses won’t get a bill shock at the end of the month; instead you can deal with it before it becomes a problem. 
• Integrates directly with your service providers: With Visibill your itemised billing is imported directly from your service provider and processed by Visibill so that your subscriber, package, and invoice information is available on the system.
• Easily manage your telecoms: You can also allocate and administer lines effortlessly and almost instantly. Visibill splits invoice amounts and usage charges depending on your requirements and can also break up data costs, determine how many lines are active vs inactive, charge bands to see where the majority of lines are, and give you a breakdown of how much data each subscriber uses – all on one centralised dashboard.
• Create insightful reports: The system also consists of several dashboards where you can view monthly spend and monthly data usage over any period. You can also easily export this data to Microsoft Excel and create summarised or detailed reports for voice, data, and SMS. This allows you to determine expenditure for your entire organisation by department allowing you to draw reports highlighting high usage or misuse and curb unnecessary overheads. It also allows you to see where you are as opposed to the previous month, and it will predict where it thinks you will go.
• Automatic daily updates: The system updates automatically every day.

Additional functionality

Line locking and data inhibition

Additional functionality includes the option to soft lock lines, or even inhibit data for certain users.

With soft locking Visibill can automatically soft-lock lines when they reach a threshold, or an authorised person can go through and soft lock the line manually.

The data inhibitor feature, on the other hand, can be applied so that a person can still use the line for Voice and SMS but won’t be using data.

Analyse data usage by APN

When using an APN, Visibill is also useful as it allows you to customise usage profiles to allow certain people to have a specific amount of data on that APN.

Visibill also integrates with a RADIUS server, which means that when you use an APN, you can provision and de-provision SIMs off that server immediately, and control spend there.

Budgeting

It also has budgeting features so that you can look at spend per department and per cost centre.

What’s more is that you have visibility into your top spenders, which is measured in Rand value, but you can also view usage in terms of data bands allowing you to see who uses between 1GB – 2GB or who is using between 10GB – 20GB.

Custom profiles for specific user groups

The system also provides the functionality to allocate a person’s email address and name and the allocated cost centre to each line, so that when you’re drawing reports by cost centre or department, you can do this based on the organisational structure.

You can then see details regarding daily or even hourly usage, and if it is allocated, you can view whether the call, SMS or data usage was for business or a closed user group together with other details of a call.

Empower employees to view their line usage and declare calls as private or business

Each employee with a cellphone line can log onto the system and will be able to see their own line.

Because of Visibill’s built-in organisational structure, each business unit or department will also be able to see what their department is spending and make adjustments based on this.

Customised to your business requirements

What’s more is that as a Software Development company, Rysis can adjust, customise, and integrate the Visibill product into existing systems based on your business requirements.

“Visibill is easy to use. We import your itemised billing information for your entire organisation’s telecoms expenditure into one central database daily, allowing you to view usage, monitor expenditure and therefore drive costs down,” said Bell.

30-day termination notification and an obligation-free PoC

Visibill offers a 30-day termination notification – which means there are no long-term binding contracts.

Interested parties can also test the system for a month through Visibill’s obligation-free proof of concept before making any commitment.

For more information, visit the Visibill website.