Telecom and technology expense management is software that tracks what a company pays for its phone lines, network connections and data feeds, checks every bill, and finds what the company pays for but does not use. The telecom part is often called telecom expense management (TEM). It covers the spending that software licence tools do not see.
A large company may have thousands of mobile connections, hundreds of internet lines and dozens of paid data services. Each one has its own monthly bill, from different operators and providers. Nobody checks them line by line. So the company keeps paying for the connections of staff who have left, for lines at offices that have closed, and for the same service bought twice by two departments.
The software collects every bill, from the operators' invoice files or by reading the PDFs. It records each connection: its number, its plan, its monthly charge and the employee or office it belongs to. It then compares the bills with the company's own records. It checks the HR system for employees who have left, and it checks how much each line was actually used.
Here is a typical case. An IT services company in Noida pays for 4,200 company mobile connections. The software finds 380 connections that made no calls and used no data for three months. 140 of them belong to employees who have already left. At ₹450 a month each, the 380 idle lines cost ₹1,71,000 a month, or about ₹20.5 lakh a year. The software also finds 60 connections billed at a higher rate than the one in the company's contract with the operator. An employee in the admin team reviews the list. She closes the idle lines and asks the operator to refund the overcharges.
Banks and investment firms have a second large bill: market data. This means live share prices, bond prices and news, delivered to traders' screens through paid terminals and data feeds. The companies that supply this data are described under financial market data. For many banks, it is one of their largest technology costs. Here the software tracks which employee uses which terminal and which feed. It finds, for example, two teams that pay separately for the same exchange's price feed. This part is described on the page on market data management.
How does it differ from its neighbours? Software asset management (SAM) tracks software licences on servers and laptops. SaaS management tracks subscriptions to software used over the internet. This product tracks the rest: phone lines, network lines and data. New purchases of any of these are raised in procure-to-pay software.