Handling Your Billing Disputes

When you review your invoice, you may find a few issues that don’t add up right. Maybe that rate reduction for calls to Canada you negotiated didn’t take effect last month like it was supposed to, or perhaps your carrier is still billing you for the dedicated circuit you cancelled four months ago. Before you rush to issue a dispute with your carrier, you need to know what, and how, you can dispute.

Understanding your carrier’s process

Every carrier has its own process for addressing billing disputes. Before filing a dispute, find out the procedure. Before submitting the dispute on the correct form and to the right e-mail address, ask about the timeline for resolution. The standard turnaround time on billing disputes is 30 to 60 days. I would like to say this is a clean and efficient process, but I have seen the process take over six months.

You can call a customer service representative at your carrier, but often all you need to do is check your paperwork. Every contract for long-distance service has a section regarding billing disputes. If you don’t have a contract for phone service, you can usually find a similar section embedded within your phone bill. And the general policy is often listed online, as well. Regardless of where it lives, the section tells you all the logistics of the dispute process. In particular, the information covered includes the following:

• The method for issuing disputes: Some carriers require you to submit a dispute in writing, while others begin working on a dispute from a phone call. Your contract may also stipulate the required supporting documentation you need to supply before the carrier begins working on your issue. Only after you supply the information can you get your dispute into the system and get your credit rolling.

• A time frame for you to dispute charges: As a general rule, carriers only allow a 30- to 45-day window to dispute any charges on your invoice. After that time frame, the carrier can (and will) summarily reject any dispute you submit, regardless of its validity.

• Info on whether you must pay a disputed charge: Your contract stipulates whether you must pay disputed charges while the amount is in dispute. This is an important detail, because you will be charged late fees on the disputed portion of the bill if you withhold money when you’re not authorized to do so.

Working the appeals process

If your dispute is legitimate and has been denied for some unfounded reason, resubmit the dispute. The carrier surely has an appeals process, so if you feel unjustly rejected, restate your case. Accepting the fact that some of your disputes will be rejected is healthy, because you may be unaware of contract details hammered out, or overlooked by, your boss. Graciously understanding the disputes that are denied also generates a good rapport with the dispute department and ensures that credits flow smoother when they are granted.

 Tip  No matter what your carrier requires, however, you should always send disputes in writing. You don’t have to use fancy calligraphy and secure the envelope with a wax seal, but you need a paper trail if the dispute ever gets to the point of mediation. When you document the dispute, listing as much information as possible is important; detailed information can prevent delays, and, of course, delays just perpetuate problems.

 Remember  Instead of writing a letter of dispute, you could call your representative and say that you think your interstate rates to Montana are wrong; the carrier may make a good-faith effort to fix the problem, checking all your outbound calls to Montana. Two or three months later, the rep may call you back and say that he or she couldn’t find anything wrong. That’s when you review your notes and say, that it was toll-free calls from Montana that have the wrong rate. Get all the information in one place, in writing, the first time to prevent a mountain of frustration later.

Tracking your disputes

Of course, I hope you don’t have multiple disputes with your carrier (if you do, you need to start shopping for a new carrier), but it could happen, especially if you have complicated services and a large phone system. If you have more than one dispute in process, you need to track them carefully. The carrier may aggregate disputes for the same issues that appear over several invoices, or it may lump them together by month. The carrier may also lose disputes that you submit. In the end, it is your business’s money at stake, so I don’t suggest you rely on someone else to manage it.

 Tip  Use Excel Workbook to track your disputes for the year. Make the first tab a summary by month with cells aggregating the total dollar amount for disputes by month. Itemize all of your disputes chronologically on the second tab. The columns of information on the second tab should include:

• Invoice date for the dispute: If you dispute rates on the July invoice and your carrier checks the June invoice, well . . . that’s not very good.

• Dollar amount in dispute: The carrier needs to know the bottom line you are expecting as a credit. Determine this amount on your own — don’t wait for your carrier to calculate it for you.

• Specifics of the dispute: In a sentence or two, give the gist of the dispute for easy reference. For example, you might say, “Acme Corp. was charged 14 cents a minute in July for outbound calls to Canada even though the contract stipulates that all outbound calls to Canada will be charged at a rate of 8 cents a minute.”

   Remember  Keep this info short and simple. You have other documentation if you really need to go into specifics, but on a tracking spreadsheet, you simply need enough to jog your memory.

• The date the dispute was submitted: Having this information in a separate tracking document validates that you submitted the dispute within the time frame required by your contract.

• Whether the dispute has been approved, denied, or remains pending: You need to track the results of the process so you know which issues are still open.

• Credit amount, if approved: A full credit is not always given, so you need to track the actual credit amounts along with the amount in dispute. Having this information in one place reminds you that you need to pay the remainder that was not credited.

Most carriers are relatively reasonable, even if the process is a bit arduous. If your dispute is valid, you should receive a credit. If your dispute is valid but it goes back farther than 30 days, your carrier has the discretion to ignore the claim. Carriers often offer courtesy credits for issues that may not have been their problem. They want to hang on to their business, and the best way to do so is to keep customers happy. Keep this information in mind and you will appreciate it all the more when a carrier bends the rules for you and credits your account for the past six months; likewise, you will understand all the better why sometimes a carrier has to hold firm and deny your claim.