When last did you actually look at your supermarket till slip in any detail? Do you check to see you weren’t charged for six tins of baked beans instead of five? I’ll bet you don’t.
And then there are those regular, boring, monthly bills that are paid by debit order. Who in their right mind is actually going to read those when you know the pixies have already taken the money out of your bank account anyway?
Well, good financial health is as much about saving money as it is about investing it. And, as I discovered recently, taking the time to read your bills can result in quite a significant saving. Like many other people, I was concerned about how much I was spending every month on mobile communication, but it’s my only way of staying in touch, so I just bite the bullet and pay. Until, that is, my cellphone account was about R900 too high.
This was just after I’d got a new, very pretty, very sexy, very expensive phone and had changed from the contract I’d been on for ages to a comparable one that the very persuasive salesperson assured me would save me hundreds of rands a month. I thought my next cellphone account would be less. Instead, it was hundreds of rands more. And that’s when I started really looking at, reading and trying to understand my invoices – “trying” being the operative word.
I am not the most financially literate person on the planet, and it took me a couple of days (I am not exaggerating) of trawling through the account to work out what the problem was. I had been charged a subscription for the old contract, and for the new one. So in one month I was paying for two subscriptions. Even though it had taken me days to work out, that was the easy bit. The hard part was yet to come.
I contacted Nashua Mobile, my service provider, and spoke to a very friendly, pleasant, helpful-sounding person. She assured me that, yes, I had been invoiced twice, but I had been credited with the extra amount. But the fact remained that the bill was at least R800 too much. So, after a bit more whingeing on my part, my query was “escalated”.
I am not going to bore you with the gory details, and they are pretty gory. What was interesting is that, after being escalated to a more highly qualified person, I still had to go back to the statement to figure out where I had been overcharged.
So I trawled through the statement again and came up with a number of little invoices. The statement, by the way, is 15 pages long, and only three of those are itemised billing. So there are 12 pages of invoices and credit notes – all just strung together in a relatively haphazard fashion. I still couldn’t figure out exactly where I had been overcharged, but the exercise did bring to light some other interesting facts:
* I was being charged anything between R20 and R50 a month for calls, even though I had not exceeded my so-called “free” minutes.
* I was paying for itemised billing on a data contract. That was useful. So now I knew that all my 3G connections were to MWeb.
* I was being charged compulsory caller line identification on a data contract. Yeah, I wouldn’t want MWeb not to accept my connection because I might be a resentful ex-spouse or a telesalesperson.
Wow, it’s amazing the things you find when you start looking.
Eventually, I worked out that the credit note had been cancelled out by a lot of little invoices for things connected with my new phone, and that I shouldn’t have been paying for.
Here’s where it gets really good. This management-level person explained to me that the credit note cancelled out the double billing as well as cancelling out the other invoices that added up to the amount. So one credit equals two debits? I queried that on the phone – rather heatedly, I confess. He did admit that, usually, one credit equals one debit but that, in this case ... Well, I didn’t actually follow his reasoning but he assured me that he was right and that I was wrong.
And that’s when I got sarky and sent him a grade-three-level simplification of the bill, replacing caller line identification fees and all kinds of other technical things with bananas, oranges and apples, explaining to him that if I was invoiced R20 for bananas, R40 for oranges and R40 for apples, as well as being charged R100 for “fruit”, I was being double billed. That’s when he stopped communicating with me and “escalated” my query again.
I had great hopes of my second “escalation”. Surely now I would be passed on to someone who understood the principle of debits and credits cancelling each other out. But no, I got a lovely letter, apologising most profusely for confusing a simple person like me. It’s such a gem; I quote it here verbatim in full:
“Hi Jennifer,
“Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. I am liaising with Ian to get a simple (unbiased) way of explaining the credits so that we can all understand it better. Unfortunately, very often one falls into the trap of looking at things from an internal point of view (as we are so used to the processes, etc) and not taking in to account that our customers may not be able to see thing (sic) in a similar way. Once I have all the facts, I will contact you so that we can go through what happened and what was done to ensure that everything balances as it should.
“Kind regard (sic) ...”
To cut a long story short, I did not see things in a similar way and was very smartly escalated to another genius, who sent a colour-coded spreadsheet with his email reply. It was a masterpiece. Clearly, this person spent a lot of time cutting and pasting the numbers from the invoice and feeding them directly into a spreadsheet. And then using the paint function, because a bit of colour should make it all totally comprehensible, surely?
So I decided the time had come to throw my toys right across the room. As John Cleese says, “Sometimes it helps to shout until you’re blue in the mouth.” Tadaaa, I was escalated – for the fourth time – to a man who looked at my account and realised that I had been double billed. He also addressed the charging for calls, caller identification and itemised billing on the data line, and a few other things that just sort of slipped in as small, one-off charges relating to my new phone.
While I had the attention of someone who could add and subtract – and, incidentally, spell – I tackled him on the fact that, when I got the new phone, I chose the contract based on a quick look at my previous accounts.
Because I always seemed to have billable calls, I assumed that I had always gone just that little bit over my allocated minutes. So I chose the equivalent account. (Actually, I had been too lazy to do this, so I just took the word of the salesperson. You’re right: with that attitude, I deserve to be ripped off.)
As noted earlier, I was, on average, using a few hundred rands’ worth of “minutes” less a month than I was being allocated. This is a particularly interesting aspect to the whole debacle.
Let’s face it, when you’re forking out about R1 000 a month on your cellphone bill, are you likely to even notice if your account is about R10, R20 or R30 too much, especially if you’ve already paid it by debit order? And especially if your statement is so complicated that even the so-called experts in the accounting department of the company that produced it can’t understand it. Now multiply that R10, R20 or R30 by a few hundred thousand customers every month. Hmmm?
I’m not accusing anyone of anything illegal, and perhaps I am the only person in South Africa who is being overcharged on my cellphone account, but I don’t think so.
Flawed systems
I chatted to Gary James, the managing director of StrategyOnline.co.za.
Last year his company developed a tool for Nedbank clients to analyse their bank statements, and this year StrategyOnline turned its attention to helping consumers understand and analyse their phone statements.
“[The] software was initially designed to help consumers answer questions like ‘What are my peak call times?’ and ‘What can I do to reduce my phone bill in the future?’,” James says.
“But it has also become an auditing tool, helping consumers to identify how the telecoms companies are, in some cases, charging them for items they simply shouldn’t be paying for.
“The most shocking discovery which we have encountered is duplicated entries on statements, where consumers are clearly being charged for the same call more than once! How large companies in South Africa can be using such flawed systems to generate phone bills is unfathomable,” he adds.
The upshot was that I got Nashua Mobile to change my contract to a much more reasonable one considering my phone usage. And I was credited with R1 710.54. Interestingly, this amount included a credit for the erroneously charged minutes for the previous three months, because they could go no further back than that. Well, I’ve had this account since 1997, and an average of, say, even R5 or R10 a month, never mind R20 or R30 over that period of time could add up to quite a tidy little sum that I have just allowed to dissipate into – well, I dunno – someone else’s bank account, I guess. Where does feral money go?
Anyhow, there was no point getting my knickers in a knot about that, I was just pleased it was all over. Or was it? Because then I got my statement for the following month, and it was even higher.
So I glanced through it, noticed an interesting invoice of R799.65 for “administration”, and decided I just couldn’t face going any further. So I sent it straight back to the nice man who could add and subtract, and asked him to look at it.
The nice literate and numerate man wrote back to me and apologised for the “manual invoice of R799.65 which was captured in error”, and promptly credited me for that amount.
I realise that it is my responsibility to check all accounts that are sent to me but, hey, I’m far too busy and too cool to do that. Well, I was. I have now become an in-depth reader of cellphone accounts. I read them, but that doesn’t mean I understand them.
I still can’t bring myself to check till slips, though. That’s my New Year's resolution for 2011.
A PROGRAM TO HELP YOU
Phone companies provide itemised statements, but unless you have lots of spare time on your hands each month, these statements aren’t particularly easy to understand unless you have help.
Now help is available in the form of a computer program called Phone Statement Analyzer (PSA), which has been built by StrategyOnline, a software company based in Somerset West. StrategyOnline also developed Nedbank Personal Money Manager.
With PSA, you will be able to gain insights into your phone statements with minimal effort, Gary James, the managing director of StrategyOnline, says.
The program is able to answer questions such as:
* Who do I call most frequently?
* Why is my phone bill higher this month – were there any unusual calls that I should take note of?
* Who in my family or organisation is responsible for which portions of my phone bill?
* Which package offered by the service providers would best suit my calling habits?
“PSA also checks your statements for potential billing errors and inconsistencies. The software automatically looks for duplicated charges, duplicated calls, calls where you were charged but shouldn't have been, incorrectly calculated call rates, and so forth,” he says.
PSA can distinguish between your business and private calls, and allows you to generate a business expense claim form at the end of each month.
“Think of PSA as your own secretary, who will sift through your phone statements, identify suspicious calls or amounts, answer your questions, and even suggest ways in which you can save money,” James says.
To use the program, you first download your phone statements from your service provider.
Alternatively, James says, StrategyOnline can do the download for you, and your statements “will simply ‘appear’ in the software each month”.
This is a convenient service, but it does require a level of trust. StrategyOnline is offering all Personal Finance readers a free, six-month licence for PSA. To download your copy, visit www.strategyonline.co.za/personalfinancemag
This article was first published in the 1st quarter 2011 edition of Personal Finance magazine.