People + Software
Your TEM software is working perfectly. That's the problem.
Expense-management platforms report the services you're paying for. They can't tell you which ones you actually use, and that gap is where the money is.
There’s a quiet assumption behind every “TEM software” pitch: that visibility is the same thing as savings. Buy the dashboard, see the spend, fix the spend. It sounds right. It isn’t.
Software reports what you have. It can’t tell you what you use.
A platform can ingest every invoice, normalize it, and show you a beautiful inventory of 11,000 line items. What it cannot do is walk into your Dallas office and confirm that the circuit on line 412 hasn’t carried a packet since 2019. Only a person can ask that question, and only a person can get the honest answer from the engineer who actually knows.
This is why a software-only inventory looks complete and still leaves millions on the table. It’s an accurate map of the spend. It is not a map of the waste.
The 70% that only a human finds
About 70% of the savings we deliver in the first year comes from disconnecting services nobody was using. Not renegotiation. Not rate arbitrage. Disconnection. And the only way to know what’s safe to disconnect is to interrogate the inventory, line by line, with the people closest to the spend.
We call it the “Decide” phase. Our founder calls it the human half of the job. It usually starts with a defensive engineer who doesn’t want to admit anything is unused, and ends, six months later, with that same engineer writing a testimonial: “Why haven’t we always had this?”
He never had the information, or support, to manage his spend until TruNorth arrived.
”Don’t hate the player”
When a public-company CEO learned we’d found $6M in a single year, she called and asked: “What were we doing wrong?”
The honest answer was nothing. This category is genuinely hard. Your team is doing the most important job: keeping the business running. No one wants to wait on hold with Verizon, and the carriers count on exactly that.
Software is informative. People are accountable. The two together, software to see it, a human to confirm and cut it, and a team that then pays the bills directly so the savings don’t bleed back, are the difference between a dashboard and a result.
The test: ask your current TEM tool how much it has disconnected this year. Then run the Phantom Tax check and compare.