How do I check my telephone bill?

Checking your telephone bill is important. Telecom companies do make mistakes occasionally and you should be able to find these mistakes so that you will not pay too much.

Colleagues, friends and other people might use your telephone without you knowing and without you being aware of these costs. Also internal and external fraud can result in very high cost.

To summarize: It pays to check your telephone bill. It will save you money,

Most people do not check their telephone bill. Even if they do want to check it, they do not know how and they do not have the means to do it. Some compare their present invoice to the previous one, or to the invoice of the same period of the last year. This can give some indication, but no more than that.

In order to be able to check your telecom bill you should have some call specifications. This means you should receive the following details:

Date, time, duration, your telephone number, telephone number called and the cost. You can have these specifications in several ways:

Specification of all calls.

This is nice and gives you a lot of information about all your calls, but is not so practical as you are not going to look at all these numbers. It is simply too much. From our experience we know that practically nobody checks these specs.

A better way is to have some more information about your calls. There are many possibilities here and every telephone supplier that can deliver such extra information chooses its own system. We have decided that the most important information to our customers is the cost and the destination of their calls. So we deliver not only complete specification of each call, but also the 10 most expensive calls and he 10 biggest destinations.

Since we have started with this system – about 6 years ago – practically all questions we receive are about these parts of the invoice, so it is clear that with this extra information, customers find it easy to check their invoices.

Another aspect to be considered is the invoice period. Only KPN sends bi-monthly invoices. The rest of the telecom suppliers send monthly invoices. Monthly invoices are better, mainly because it is easier to remember the calls made one month ago then to remember calls made two months ago. Also, mistakes can be corrected and fraud can be stopped earlier.

Summary: Ask for extra information from your telecom supplier regarding cost, duration and destination of your calls. Also ask also for monthly invoices, not bi-monthly. If they cannot or do not want to deliver this – find a telecom supplier that does. (See our article “how to choose a new telecom supplier).