Bill audit

Send us the bill and the things the bill does not say.

The invoice tells us the carrier, the account, the lines and what you are paying. It does not tell us what the lines are attached to, how tall the building is, or who monitors the fire panel. Those decide which replacement is legal, so we ask for them here.

Not sure this affects you yet? You do not need to send a bill to find out — the copper page explains what is being retired and which lines it reaches, and the watch lists the dates by state. Come back here when you want the lines read.

What happens after you send it

  1. We email you to confirm the bill arrived, and tell you then what the reading depends on and when to expect it back.
  2. We read the invoice line by line and work out what each line is physically attached to — a fire panel, an elevator phone, an alarm circuit, a fax nobody has used in years, or a voice line somebody still answers.
  3. We check what the carrier has actually filed against those wire centers, so the answer is about your addresses rather than about the retirement in general.
  4. If something on the bill cannot be identified from the bill, we ask you. That is usually one email, not a meeting.
  5. You get a written audit back.

What we need from you

  • One recent telecom bill — a PDF, or photographs of the pages. One property is enough to start.
  • The address where the lines physically are, which on many invoices is not the address printed at the top.
  • The building details the invoice cannot carry: how tall it is, how many elevator banks, who monitors the fire panel. There are fields for these below, and "I don't know" is an acceptable answer to any of them — we would rather have the bill without them than not have the bill.

What you get back

A line-by-line register of the account: what each line is, what it costs, which ones the retirement reaches and which it does not, and a replacement option per affected line with the trade-offs written down — what it costs, what it needs installed, and what it will not do. If your lines are in good shape, we'll tell you that too.

It is a written document, not a quote to sign. Nothing about your service changes unless you approve a specific order in writing, and you are free to take the audit and do nothing with it.

How long it takes

Reading the bill is the quick part. The variable is confirming what is actually provisioned on the account and what the carrier has filed for those wire centers, and that depends on records we do not control. We give you a date when we confirm the bill arrived, rather than a number on a web page that would be a guess about your account.

What it costs

Nothing. There is no fee for the audit and no fee to us at any point — a supplier pays us a residual if you eventually buy something, which is set out in the Terms of Service and on the about page. That is also why the audit says when a line is fine: a residual only continues while the service does.

Who you are
The building — not the billing address

This must be the address where the lines physically are. On a lot of invoices the address at the top is the corporate or remit-to address, and the building is only identified further down, or by an account number. If those two differ on your bill, put the building here and the mailing address in the field below it.

We ask because a portfolio audited against billing addresses produces a building list that does not exist. Every wrong building is a signal survey somebody drives to for nothing.

If this is filled in, we will never treat it as a building. It is used for correspondence only.
The building itself

Best estimates are fine and are more useful than blanks. Every field here has an I do not know option, and choosing it tells us something real — it is recorded as asked-and-unknown, not as zero, so nobody later mistakes it for a single-storey building with no lift.

Leave blank if unknown.
Lowest to highest floor served. This is the one that matters most: ASME A17.1-2019 adds a video requirement at 60 feet, and floor count alone will not tell us which side of that you are on.
Groups of cars, not individual cars. 0 if none.
They have to certify whatever replaces the line, so knowing them early saves a round trip.
Send one bill now. If there are more buildings, say how many here and we will work out the rest with you rather than asking for fourteen uploads.
The account

Five things the invoice cannot tell us. All optional — leave anything blank you are not sure about, and we will confirm it with the carrier rather than guess.

If several, the buildings question above is where the count goes. Multi-site accounts are quoted differently from single-site ones, so it changes the shape of the answer rather than just its size.
The name on the invoice. If the lines were resold to you by someone else, put both and we will untangle it.
A rough count is fine. If the bill lists them, we will count them properly — this is to tell a four-line building from a four-hundred-line one before we open it.
Leave blank if you do not know — most people do not, and it is on the contract rather than the bill. It matters because a term that has already rolled over is a different conversation from one with eight months left.
The bill
One recent invoice, PDF, up to 10 MB. A scan or a phone photo saved as PDF is fine — we run OCR. If yours is a spreadsheet or a portal export, email it instead and we will deal with it.
Optional. Your audit is not affected either way.
We use this to prepare your audit and to contact you about it. We do not sell or share it. There is an unsubscribe link on every email we send, and if you would rather just talk, call (715) 620-9212.