Monday, April 24, 2006

Nextel Usage Report

I Manage a 120 phone Nextel account. Anyone who is in my shoes understands the trouble my previous statement carries with it. Nextel billing is unacceptably poor, and nearly impossible to read and detail out. Nextel does offer a program called "Smart CD+" that has a few included reports, but these reports are as difficult to read as the bill itself.

A Nextel Bill is printed with a minutes used column that can be VERY decieving. This column totals all minutes used for the month, with no regard for special programs you may have contained in your contract. Items like "Free Nights and Weekends" and "Free Mobile to Mobile" are not accounted for, and all used minutes end up in this dump. When you try to read the detail on a Nextel bill you can not since only charged calls have their detail printed, yet the minutes column totals for ALL minutes.

I however have written a report, that we have been using for several months now, and I have tweaked it for general usage. This report uses the included database each month from the smart CD and shows a summary of only "CHARGEABLE" minutes for each phone. I sent this file over to my Nextel reps so they could use it with their customers, and I am posting it here on my blog as well.

Written is Crystal Reports 9, this report demonstrated to us as a company that we were paying for over 70,000 minutes when in reality, less that 30,000 minutes of our total usage was billed minutes. Using this report with the Smart CD+ data will save us as a company tens of thousands of dollars a year.

I would encourage any Nextel Administrators to download this file and follow the instructions included in the archive for using your monthly Smart CD data.

3 comments:

Randy said...

Call me cynical, but I can think of tens of thousands (and that is just one company) of good reasons why Nextel would not want to simplify the billing process. However, I do hope you get a percentage of the savings in a bonus or salary adjustment. You certainly earned it for your company!

Anonymous said...

Good for you! It makes me sad all the people trying to "pull one over" just to make a dime. We built a capitalist society and get what we paid for - people who only care about capital.

Christine Boles said...

Kevin, not to pull off the subject, but how is your mom?