Stop budgeting for technology your team stopped using.
Send Emily the Telecom or Utility line you're about to commit to for FY27, plus one of your messiest invoices. In 15 minutes she'll tell you what your likely phantom expense numbers are, before it locks. No deck, no demo, no MSA.
29% average first-year savings. Your savings beat our fees in year one, or we credit the difference against your ongoing work with us.
Emily Lindner, Founder & CEO, since 2005.
The FY27 budget line, two ways
- Last year's actuals $1,000,000
- Plus 7% $1,070,000
- Circuits into locations you no longer occupy
- Disconnects that never stopped billing
- Contracts that fell off their rate
What a line review looks at
Illustrative. Your real number comes from your own line and one invoice.
29%
Average first-year savings
~70% from disconnecting unused services
$42M
Saved for our clients
Audacy · Cumulus · CBS
6+ yrs
Average client tenure
they stay because it keeps working
100%
Year-1 ROI guarantee
your savings beat our fees, or we credit the difference
Last year plus 7% is a photocopy of last year's mistakes.
Somewhere in your building, next year's Telecom and Utility line is being built from last year's actuals plus 7%. Last year's number is not a plan. It is a receipt. Every one of these six is already inside it. None of them is anyone's fault. All of them compound.
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The roll-forward compounds the waste.
The number came from the general ledger, so it feels like a fact. It is a fact about what was paid, never about what was needed. Every unused service, every billing error nobody caught, every circuit into an empty building rolls forward with it. Add 7% and you have committed to all of it again, with a raise.
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The baseline was never audited.
Even Gartner reports that 85% of Telecom invoices contain errors and 80% of those errors are never found. Aberdeen reports that 85% of mid-market invoices are paid in full with no audit at all. AP paid the bill, which was the job. IT never checked it against what's in use. The forecast you are building sits on numbers no human ever validated.
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Contract cliffs are not in the model.
A percentage forecast cannot see a contract expiration. A copper circuit running at $500 a month fell off contract, and the next invoice was $14,000. Yes, it's legal. Carriers stopped investing in copper years ago; price is the lever that moves customers off it. One expiration can blow a line item.
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Last year's savings may not have happened.
You approved a cut. The disconnect order went in. The carrier confirmed it. Finance booked the savings into the plan. In TruNorth's experience, 11% of placed disconnect orders never stop the billing. Nobody follows the order to the invoice, because everyone treats the confirmation email as the finish line. It isn't. Those savings are in your baseline.
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Nobody owns the category.
Finance pays the bills but cannot read them. IT can read them but is measured on uptime. In Emily's words, "This is a hot potato between finance and IT, sometimes even passed over to HR. No one naturally owns this." So it surfaces every budget season, gets flagged, and gets deferred. Compounding.
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The acquisition you closed left something behind.
Every deal brings contracts nobody signed, for services nobody can identify, at rates nobody negotiated. They roll into actuals and then into next year's forecast. And it can be worse than a cost: we have seen a utility company physically remove the electric meter from an acquired building because the bill, still in the seller's name, never reached the new owner.
The long version, in Emily's words: The 7% Problem, why your FY27 technology budget is last year's mistakes, compounded.
Send the FY27 budget line and one messy invoice. Get 15 minutes with the person who reads these for a living.
Send Emily the Telecom or Utility line you're about to commit to for FY27, plus one of your messiest invoices. In 15 minutes she'll tell you what your likely phantom expense numbers are, before it locks. No deck, no demo, no MSA.
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Before the call
You send two things: the line and one invoice. That's the whole ask.
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The 15 minutes
Emily reads the invoice with you in plain English and says which lines look like services nobody uses, errors nobody caught, and disconnects that never stopped.
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After
You lock a number you can defend. If there's more to find, you'll know what a full review would look at. If there isn't, you'll know that too.
Either way you leave with an answer: what's a phantom expense, what's accurate, and what Emily would do next.
Your savings beat our fees in year one, or we credit the difference against your ongoing work with us.
Send us your worst Telecom issue.
Send TruNorth your most frustrating Telecom issue, as the bill itself, as screenshots or as a plain description. TruNorth evaluates it and sends back recommended next steps, for you to execute on your own or for TruNorth to execute and resolve. The form takes the upload and books time with Emily.
What counts as an issue:
Paying or even getting the bill
- An invoice that's incredibly hard to get paid on time
- A bill you can't obtain (it defaults to the installation address, or multi-factor login locks you out of the portal)
Audit
- "What is this bill for?" (experts translate)
- "Why are these charges on my bill?"
- "Why did this bill jump 5x?"
- A promised credit that just disappeared
- Contract rates that were never implemented
- Early termination fees you shouldn't owe
- A disconnect order that never gets completed
Sourcing
- "I can't get service to this site."
85% of Telecom invoices contain errors. Source: Gartner
Did last year's savings actually happen?
In TruNorth's experience, 11% of placed disconnect orders never stop the billing. The order goes in, the carrier confirms it, finance books the savings, and roughly one time in nine the invoice just keeps coming. Sometimes for years. Sometimes on a completely different invoice from the same carrier.
Think one of yours never stopped? Send us that bill.
$28,800
One phantom charge on a second invoice.
A $400 a month component kept billing for six years after the circuit was cancelled: different invoice, different platform, different account number. Six years.
A CFO signs. Two other people can block. This is for all three.
A number you can defend.
A line you can forecast, not a line you hope holds. The money conversation is one sentence: your savings beat our fees in year one, or we credit the difference against your ongoing work with us. After that, the number stops creeping back.
A disconnect is an engineering call, not an accounting one.
A TruNorth analyst reviews every line with the people closest to the spend and confirms what's still in use. We cancel what no one uses and make sure nothing dependent gets cut. Software can't tell you what nobody's using. A person has to ask. The engineer who hates us in month one is usually the one asking, six months later, why they haven't always had this.
One messy invoice is the whole ask.
It's no one's fault. The job was to pay the invoice, and it was paid. These bills are written in Latin. They're 17 pages. Hand over one of them and you've done your part. Later, TruNorth pays the bills as your agent of record, so a service is never cut over a missed invoice.
What a full engagement looks like, if the review finds enough to warrant one.
We run the whole process on your behalf.
Five phases, run as a cycle. The load sits with us, so your team barely lifts a finger.
- 1
Discover
We pull every bill, account, and carrier portal into one plain-English inventory.
You: Hand us a list of accounts. That’s it.
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Decide
A TruNorth analyst reviews every line with the people closest to the spend, asking whether it is still in use.
You: Confirm what you actually need.
- 3
Disconnect
We cancel what no one uses and make sure nothing dependent gets cut.
You: Nothing. We execute it.
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Discount
We renegotiate what remains with your true buying power across every location.
You: Nothing. We negotiate.
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Defend
We pay the bills on time and re-audit every year so savings never bleed back.
You: Centralize new service requests and approvals through us.
“Better, more reliable forecasting and lower costs which means more profit to deliver to shareholders. THANK YOU TruNorth!”
“Sometimes I'm a therapist, sometimes I'm a translator. We're the secret decoder ring that turns thousands of unreadable invoices into one screen, in plain English.”
Emily Lindner Founder & CEO · since 2005 No line handy yet? Run the 60-second Phantom Expense check and bring the number to the call.
How much are you leaking?
Most multi-location enterprises overpay 15 to 22% on fragmented Telecom spend. Answer four questions and we'll estimate your hidden spend, then send you our most relevant forensic case study.
- ✓ Free · 60 seconds · no sales pitch
- ✓ Your number, based on your spend & locations
- ✓ Get the forensic case study instantly
Four things people ask first
We already audited this ourselves.
Good. Genuinely. High fives. You can move the needle on a lot of this in a spreadsheet, and we'd never tell you otherwise. One client's internal audit found $787,000. As Emily puts it: "They high-fived, and I would have too." Two years later TruNorth was in; by year three it was $7.4 million, roughly nine times what the internal pass surfaced. Not because their people weren't smart. Because an internal audit is something you do between everything else, and this category doesn't give up its secrets to a part-time effort. Laser beam focus. This is all we do. Worth 15 minutes to see what's left after your pass?
What does it cost?
Your savings beat our fees in year one, or we credit the difference against your ongoing work with us. You lose nothing. Emily would rather spend the 15 minutes on your bill than on a rate card, and if there's nothing there she'll tell you.
You'll disconnect something live. Our engineers will fight this.
They should fight it, and we want them to. A disconnect is an engineering call, not an accounting one. A TruNorth analyst reviews every line with the people closest to the spend and confirms what's still in use; we cancel what no one uses and make sure nothing dependent gets cut. Then we pay the bills as your agent of record so a service is never cut over a missed payment. Your engineers deserve an easy button.
Who is TruNorth?
Fair. We've been doing exactly this since 2005, 21 years, women-owned and WBENC certified. Audacy, Cumulus Media, CBS, K-LOVE, American University and Avison Young are clients you can call. Our clients stay an average of six-plus years, because it keeps working. And Emily started this as the AT&T rep on the CBS account who kept being asked what CBS was paying for on a 27-page bill. Buried in it was a data circuit billing into a building that had been physically demolished two years earlier: $3,300 a month, for two years. She fought it back to the statute of limitations and won the money back. That's still the whole job. We look.
Before the FY27 budget line locks.
Fifteen minutes, one line, one invoice. Telecom savings take 6 to 8 months to land, so a Q4 start lands inside your budget year. An April start does not.