Saving money
Six reasons a facility phone bill is bigger than it should be.
Nursing homes rarely overpay because of the price per extension. They overpay because of what is attached to the system around it — and because nobody has read the bill line by line in years.
Where it goes
What is actually on the bill.
1. Copper lines
Analog lines for elevators, fire panels, gates and fax have been repriced hard as carriers retire copper. In some territories a single line now costs more than a whole cloud phone system.
2. Rates past their term
Contracts that ended years ago roll to list price. Nothing on the invoice announces it.
3. Per-seat licensing you do not use
Licences for staff who left, or for features nobody was trained on.
4. Fax lines
Most facilities keep two or three. Email-to-fax replaces them at a fraction of the cost.
5. PRI or T1 circuits
Sized for a call volume the building had a decade ago, and priced accordingly.
6. Equipment rental
Handsets, routers and cards that are rented indefinitely. Facilities routinely pay rental on equipment that was replaced or removed years earlier — the charge simply continues until somebody challenges it.
What to do first
Cheapest wins, in order.
If you do nothing else, do these three. They need no new system, no new handsets and no disruption to staff.
- Inventory every analog line and find out what each one actually does
- Find the contract end dates, then diary the notice windows
- Cancel fax lines you can replace with email-to-fax
- Ask for the equipment list and check it against what is in the building
Questions
What operators ask us.
Will moving to the cloud automatically save money?
Not automatically. If your system is recent and stable, replacing the copper lines behind it usually saves more, for less disruption. If the system is a decade old, the cloud is usually cheaper and much easier to run.
How much can a facility expect to save?
It depends entirely on what you are paying now, which is why we read the bills before quoting anything. Our audits have found savings across a group as large as $1.9 million a year, and in other buildings the answer has been to renegotiate and keep what is there.
Do we need new phones?
Often not. If you keep the system, nothing changes on the desk. If you move to cloud, we check whether your existing handsets are supported before quoting new ones.
Who does the work of switching?
We do. Gathering bills, porting numbers, handling the old contracts and terminations, including collections calls, is part of the job.
Find out in two minutes
Which of the six is costing you most?
The assessment asks about your lines, your system and your spend, then tells you where to start.
The order
Cheapest wins first.
Lines · Rates · Licences
Start with the copper
Usually the biggest single number.
Then the expired rates
Fastest thing to fix.
Then the licences
Pay for the people you actually have.
