The Ultimate Guide to
Leveraging Cost Consulting Services
See how our services can help save your business money.
Managing your business’s expenses can be tedious and time-consuming. And even after you take the time to organize and pay the invoices, you might still be overspending in areas you don’t realize. This is where cost consulting services come in. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about cost consulting services.
What Are Cost Consulting Services?
The most obvious role for cost consulting services is when an organization needs help managing its expenses but doesn’t have the time or resources to do so. The less obvious role is helping that organization discover surprising areas to cut costs.
Cost consulting services are offered by consultants that specialize in helping businesses save money by finding the right solutions. By reducing operating expenses and improving efficiencies, cost consulting services can help businesses improve their bottom line without disrupting operations.
Unbeknownst to many, there are various expense categories that can benefit from cost consulting such as energy, waste disposal, and telecom. Analyzing where you’re overspending can help your business minimize operating costs and produce significant savings in the process.
The Role of Business Audits in Cost Consulting
Cost consulting often involves professional auditing services, which can include minimizing costs, helping a business expose errors, improving the bottom line with long-term savings, and saving time traditionally taken up combing through bills.
Auditing services are designed with the customer in mind. They look at your organization’s needs and requirements, benchmark your current services, and identify options for improvements. They then identify potential solution providers, solicit and analyze proposals, and present results to your decision makers. This level of professional help means you’ll get the guidance and resources you need to make the best possible decision.
Getting an expert to perform audits will save you from the tedious work of having to manage all your bills and expenses. Here are three ways audit experts can help you save time and money:
Telecom Services:
Manage service implementations and ongoing billing and help with research related to providers, pricing, and service options.
Energy Services:
Ensure you never pay more than you should by auditing invoices, reviewing supplier contracts, and only purchasing from reliable energy service providers.
Waste Management:
Can reduce costs up to 60% and help your business get rid of material you no longer want, while paying as little as possible.
Audits can reveal leaks in a business’s waste, energy, and telecom operations. While most businesses do not have the time or expertise to perform a regular and detailed review of invoices, audits can cut costs significantly.
Audits are part of the cost consulting process, which consists of three basic steps:
1
Benchmark and Audit
Consultants perform an in-depth audit of all your agreements, invoices, accounts, and providers, and document your use of services in order to identify errors.
2
Analyze and Optimize
Consultants analyze your current supplier contracts and compare their prices with other competitors, ensuring you get the best rates in the market.
3
Implement and Manage
Once the audit is complete, you’re presented with cost-effective recommendations. Consultants will then transfer you to your preferred option and offer ongoing support.
Expense audits take very little time from your team and you retain complete control of the results. Audit fees are success-based, so you only pay when actual savings appear on future invoices. These services are always cash flow and budget positive.
The Role of Telecom Expense Management in Cost Consulting
Bringing in telecom expense management systems can deliver value for your business in ways you may never have imagined. Improving your bottom line might be as simple as managing expenses in one of your most critical services. Telecom expense management can benefit your business in the following ways:
Reduce Unplanned Expenses.
With cost consulting and telecom expense management, you’re more likely to spot errors in billing as well as find unneeded services, both of which can generate unplanned expenses. Reports suggest that as much as 12-20% of telecom charges are in error.
Find More Sources of Planned Savings
It’s one thing to find and prevent unplanned expenses, but planning for savings is even better. Telecom expense management can help here as well, allowing for better and easier comparison of vendors to find which one offers the best value in the market. Better yet, by bringing in telecom expense management systems, it’s a process the business itself no longer needs to engage in.
Generating Data
Telecom expense management service providers gather a vast amount of data about telecom systems, services, and costs in order to perform their function of finding errors and seeking out better deals, among other things. That same data can be taken and put to work by other departments to find other critical points.
Fast Responses
For those who outsource their telecom expense management operations, there’s the one great value of any third-party operation: responsiveness. Those third parties know their only chance of getting — and keeping — your business lies in results. So third-party businesses maintain their availability to answer your questions as needed, even as they pursue the savings and overhead improvements that make them worth hiring to begin with.
A Complete Audit
The best third-party telecom expense management providers will start with a complete benchmark and audit of your current telecom profile. This includes which provider you’re currently working with as well as the bills, accounts, and contracts, all of which will be investigated thoroughly. This alone may spot some immediate sources of savings and set up the potential for more savings to follow. It also offers an easy point of reference for future expansions; the complete audit shows what’s in place already, so it can help provide insight into what needs to be added or removed.
Optimize Services
The technology and options for telecom services continue to improve and grow. At the same time, your business’s needs and dependency on telecom services become greater and more critical. Ensuring the best types of telecom services that are cost-effective while providing scalability, flexibility, and redundancy to prevent outages is vital to your business.
How Can Waste Cost Consulting Save Your Business Money?
Recycling and waste cost management aren’t something that business executives often think of as a practice to save money, even though it can have a direct impact on your bottom line. For businesses that don’t have time to manage their own waste costs, waste cost consulting services are an intelligent option.
Waste cost consulting helps you identify the most impactful areas where you can make changes to your waste disposal. A waste audit can identify categories of cost savings and efficiencies, determine whether it’s more beneficial for you to lease equipment or purchase it, and identify additional recycling opportunities.
Can Workplace Recycling Save Your Business Money?
In general, when you recycle more, you reduce your waste, which means less waste hauling and reduced costs. When you use recycled products, you can take advantage of cost savings over purchasing new products.
Workplace recycling also leads to greater operational efficiency. Every expense counts in business, so recycling efforts can help reduce the amount of paper, glass, packing materials, pallets, and other items that need to be hauled away. Many waste disposal companies charge less to carry away your recyclables than they do for your trash. You may also need fewer pickups, and with the right documentation, you may be able to negotiate a lower fee from your hauler. Additionally, there may even be state or local tax credits for green business initiatives. These benefits add up.
Keep in mind that even recycling comes with a cost, so if you’re looking to save, your best option is to encourage employees to reduce and reuse items when possible. This is particularly applicable to regulated items because the removal of hazardous or toxic waste can be expensive.
Is Your Business Ready to Work With a Cost Consultant?
While there are plenty of benefits connected with a sustainability strategy, no strategy can produce benefits if it’s not properly put together. This is where cost consulting services come in. If you think you might need cost consulting services and want to minimize operating costs as well as uncover surprising savings, answer these questions first to determine if a cost consultant is right for your business:
Are you 100% sure your vendor invoices are accurate?
Constantly worrying about invoices will only build up more stress if you don’t have the right support to help you uncover inaccuracies. A cost consultant will review your invoices to ensure they comply with existing contracts and are clean of unnecessary fees and surcharges. They’ll also determine if your invoice matches the services provided.
Does your A/P staff have the time and expertise to dig into the details of the invoices each month?
If your staff isn’t equipped to review invoice details on a monthly basis due to lack of time or understanding, a cost consultant can help audit your invoices. Their expertise ensures they comb through bills with a keen eye, find errors, and determine better ways your business can save so you can always maintain a healthy bottom line.When was the last time your services were reviewed and optimized?
Constantly worrying about invoices will only build up more stress if you don’t have the right support to help you uncover inaccuracies. A cost consultant will review your invoices to ensure they comply with existing contracts and are clean of unnecessary fees and surcharges. They’ll also determine if your invoice matches the services provided.When you have the need for new services, does your staff have the time and expertise to investigate?
Looking for new services shouldn’t be taken lightly, and if your staff doesn’t have the time or expertise to find the right services, a cost consultant can step in and do the work for you. As experts in the field, they keep up with the newest market trends, know vendors who can provide reliable services, and have a current understanding of market rates, competitive prices, and the language used in contracts, which can be difficult to understand.Seeking the help of a company that offers cost consulting services will create real advantages for your business. When you leverage cost consulting, you’ll uncover savings and prevent overspending through a review of your current services and technologies. A good cost consultant will also help create proactive strategies for the future of your business, including a sustainability strategy that will give you a competitive advantage.
