I am so proud of my team today -

[Brando]

- At work. Last month my company signed a full agreement with a mobile website provider for nearly 1/5th the cost of our current mobile website provider. For this task we basically have to migrate over 100% of our clients by 12/31. If we get 100% of our clients migrated over by 11/27 we get 150% of our bonus payout. As you can imagine, that is some good incentive for us to get the project done in a little under 2 months' time.

Since billing/accounting with our current vendor is a damned mess, our first task is to assess how many clients we have total on the old platform. We pulled this months' invoice and it turned out to be a little over 340. Not too bad, but some things just did not add up right - we were being actively billed for clients we haven't done business with in over 6 months. "Wait a minute, let's check something out."

Sure enough, I check another client; We had cancelled them 22 months ago!

Now that we have some proof that we are still paying for clients we don't have, we shifted gears into reconciliation mode. I spent a good hour going through each client in our list (current and previous) and checking product cancellation dates. It turns out that we have been paying for over 140 mobile sites for clients that had cancelled with us. Amazing.

The tally at the end? Almost $52k we have paid over the course of time for some of these mobile websites. The oldest that we had been paying - 30 months. Wow. I guess that is what happens when the company decides to just "pay the bill" instead of actually checking.

What happens next? I just started checking this month's invoice for all of the other products we use with this vendor. After another hour this evening we're at a hair over $95k over the course of time for previously cancelled products.

That's almost $4k over what the invoice amount was

If the end result out of all of this is that we cut one of our vendors' monthly bills in half - who knows - we may get another bonus... What the hell, it doesn't hurt to ask, right?

Besides, that's money saved without having to let another person go, downsize, etc. We may even be able to hire two more people by the time we're done tomorrow!!!

[MBAtarga]

Brando,

Can you give me the name and address of this company please? I'd like to send some correspondence.

[Brando]

LOL Mark... I'm about half-way through our monthly invoice. So far I've identified approximately $290k in costs over time.

[stomachmonkey]

Good find.

But doesn't that mean you also lost ~40% of your clients?

[bell]

Also, who would be responsible for removing those clients? Hope it's not your department.....
Good investigating though, certainly hope it pays :-) for you

[Bill Douglas]

So you have been paying money to this other provider for clients you no longer have. Who's job was it to inform the old provider of terminated client contracts at the time. Maybe your team needs one less person.

[Brando]

Originally Posted by Bill Douglas

So you have been paying money to this other provider for clients you no longer have. Who's job was it to inform the old provider of terminated client contracts at the time. Maybe your team needs one less person.

That one less person happened almost a year ago.

The issue(s) were that one man was running the show in "accounting". So much was lost. The other side of the coin is I am going off of the date the cancellation orders were placed for these products. So it is documented that billing was to cease on a specific date - but did not. Vendor's responsibility to bill us correctly, our responsibility to audit.

We'll see what happens. I hope to get a cut for big cost reduction.

[Zeke]

When it comes time to ask for a raise, there should be no argument. If there is, you sure have a nice calling card for your next employer.

[porsche4life]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

Good find.

But doesn't that mean you also lost ~40% of your clients?

That would concern me as well.... Obviously there is a natural ebb and flow, but thats a huge amount, especially if you haven't picked up at least that many accounts in other places....

[Moses]

Team? What team? Run to the boss and claim all the credit for yourself. This is business, baby.

[Brando]

Originally Posted by porsche4life

That would concern me as well.... Obviously there is a natural ebb and flow, but thats a huge amount, especially if you haven't picked up at least that many accounts in other places....

When it comes to internet marketing turn-over is pretty high. Our competitor with the *lowest* turn-over is 50% - and they are an OEM referral. I'm finding that this is also back as far as 2008

So after all this, I find out that we were sent an invoice from september 2 years ago I told accounting to go shove it and send us the right invoices if they want us to reconcile products. Here I was hoping we were going to save a huge chunk of change.

On the positive-side, I did find about 200+ clients that had cancelled their services with us, but we had left the products *active* with our vendor - for which we are still being billed. There is going to be a mass-cancelling of products in the next 3 months Those are the savings I am concerned with at this point.