Many organizations are turning to outside operations-expense management companies due to the recognition of billing scrutiny as a key quality control and quality assurance issue. “When performing bill-auditing and rate-analysis services, many utilities in the United States have errors on at least one to three percent of the bills they send to their customers and have at least some of their customers on the wrong rate. Sometimes finding and fixing these quality mistakes translate into small incremental savings, but other times it’s a quality error that can add up to a major erroneous expense,” says Jeffrey Hart, CEO of Cadence Network, an operations-expense management firm.

When most customers receive their utility bill, they go through the following steps:

• The bill comes in to a customer who looks at the bill and makes a mental comparison with the last bill.
• This person then writes a check and pays the bill.
• The bill is filed in a cabinet, most likely to be never seen again.

The quality process with outside operations-expense management firms is much different. Instead of three steps, there are more than ten documented quality steps depending on the type of solution being offered.

The quality steps for operations-expense management are:

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