Security alarm dealers know the importance of billing and invoicing, but there is another activity that often gets missed and it is costing you money. Year in, year out, we’ve found that our dealers get a great return from one simple activity: auditing their list of monitored accounts versus billed accounts.
Your central station should be able to get you a full list, in Excel, of monitored accounts, including name, address, service(s), and central station account number (CSID#). Assuming you store the CSID# in your CRM/billing software, you should be able to likewise export that list to Excel. Using Excel’s lookup command, run against both lists. You’ll quickly find discrepancies—and likely start saving money by fixing them.
We recommend that our dealers audit their lists quarterly. Since our customers are also BUSY, we decided to build a report in our software to make it much faster. With either this report OR using Excel lookups, there are usually five types of discrepancies—accounts that are:
- On billing list, but not monitoring list
- On monitoring list, but not on billing list
- On both lists, but CLOSED in billing
- On both lists, open in billing, but missing RMR charges
- On both lists, but with duplicate CSID numbers in billing
On this list, the low hanging fruit is #2 and #4—you forgot to add an account to billing OR you added the account but not the RMR $. If you charge $25/month for monitoring, adding 10 accounts or charges to billing means adding $3000 in annual revenue…WOW! Also easy is #3, billing is stopped but the account wasn’t closed at the central station. Just send a quick note to cancel monitoring for 10 accounts at $4/month, and you save almost $500/year.
Potentially worrisome is #1—you’re billing an account that’s not being monitored…yikes! Often, these may end up just being typos or inconsistent account number formatting. However, if not, you want to fix it quick! As for #5, you can end up with customers on both lists but with duplicate CSID numbers in billing if you migrate a customer to a new location but neglect to update the CSID#.
Bottom line, a couple of hours can (and often does) save you hundreds or thousands of dollars, by either adding dollars to billing or reducing monitoring fees. Set up auditing as a routine quarterly maintenance process, it will be one of the most profitable you’ll ever find.