Unused phone lines and overlapping bills across 25 clinics

The situation

The group pays about $1.1M a year for electricity, gas, water and telecom across 25 clinics, through a bill-pay service. Clinics opened, moved and merged over three years, and old lines were never fully closed.

What was uploaded

• 12 months of bill summaries and line detail exported from the bill-pay service
• Site list mapping 140 accounts to 25 clinics
• Telecom line inventory from the carrier portal

What the engine found

• Telecom lines with no usage

  $14,600

  61 lines and services with no usage for six months or more, many at closed or merged sites.

  Rule: unused_line

• Estimated reads never trued up

  $12,700

  Meters billed on estimates for months, then not corrected when actual reads came in.

  Rule: estimated_reads

• Duplicate and overlapping bills

  $9,300

  The same service period billed twice after account transfers.

  Rule: overlapping_period

• Late fees on bills paid on time

  $2,100

  Late fees charged on bills the bill-pay records show were paid before the due date.

  Rule: late_fee

The numbers

Found

$38,700

Expected

$25,900

Recovered within 6 months

$23,400

Recovered includes credits for past bills and charges avoided by closing unused lines during the six months.

What it would cost, three ways

Over the same 6 months, in USD.

Time spent

About 9 hours: one export, mapping accounts to sites, and 18 credit requests.

The lesson

Closing unused lines first stopped the leak immediately; credits for past months depended on each carrier's terms, so those requests went out the same week.