Most advice about mobile costs starts with "switch provider". Often you do not need to. On the bills we audit, a large part of the waste is sitting inside the account you already have, and it can be removed without changing network, renegotiating, or waiting for your term to end. Here is the order we work through it.
The short version
- Start with leavers. Lines still billing for people who left is the single most common finding.
- Then bundles. Allowances are usually sized against usage that stopped years ago.
- Then pooling. It removes overage and waste at the same time.
- Then handsets. If the phone is paid off and the price never dropped, you are buying it twice.
- Only then consider switching. Fix the account first or you will carry the same waste to a new provider.
On this page
Lines nobody uses
Start here, because it is the biggest and the easiest. On accounts above about twenty lines it is close to universal: SIMs still billing for people who left months or years ago, because nothing in the process forced anyone to cancel them.
Pull your bill and check every line against your current staff list. You are looking for three things:
- Lines for people who have left. Cancel or reassign, depending on whether the number is worth keeping.
- Lines with no usage at all. A SIM billing every month with zero minutes and zero data is usually a device that was decommissioned, or a spare that never got issued.
- Duplicate lines for the same person. Common where someone was given a second device for a project that finished.
Do not simply cancel a line with a number worth keeping. Once a number is ceased rather than suspended, getting it back is difficult and sometimes impossible. Reassign it or park it properly instead.
Bundles sized for the wrong year
Allowances get set once, usually when the account is opened, and then nobody revisits them. Meanwhile the way people work changes. Office Wi-Fi improves, a field role becomes a desk role, someone stops travelling.
Compare each line's actual usage over three months against what it is allowed. You will typically find a group of lines using a small fraction of their bundle, and a smaller group regularly going over. Both cost you money, in opposite directions.
Right-sizing is free, it does not need a new contract, and most providers will let you change bundles mid term. It is the second biggest win after leavers, and it takes an afternoon.
Stop paying twice for the same gigabytes
If every line has its own allowance, you are guaranteed to waste some and overrun others in the same month. That is not bad management, it is arithmetic: usage varies across people and fixed bundles cannot flex.
Pooling puts one allowance across the account. The heavy users draw from the light users automatically. Nothing is wasted and overage largely disappears.
It is usually the single largest saving available on a mobile account, and it is routinely not offered, because it reduces the bill. Our explainer on pooled and aggregated data covers the mechanics, and there is a calculator on our SIM only page you can test with your own figures.
The handset you already own
On a bundled contract, part of your monthly line rental is finance on a phone. When the term ends the phone is paid for, but on many contracts the price does not drop. It simply continues.
Check your end dates. For any line past its term with the original handset still in use, you are paying for a phone you finished buying. Moving those lines to SIM only cuts the cost immediately and shortens the commitment at the same time. Our post on the SIM only versus handset maths sets out the comparison.
Add-ons and the long tail
Individually small, collectively worth checking once a year.
| What to look for | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Insurance on handsets you no longer have | Added at purchase, never cancelled when the device was replaced. |
| Content and entertainment bundles | Promotional add-ons that converted to paid after the free period. |
| International bolt-ons | Added for a trip two years ago and still running. |
| Premium or non-geographic call charges | Often avoidable by routing those calls through your phone system instead. |
| Device management licences | Billed per device, including devices that have gone. |
Roaming, the occasional big one
Roaming rarely affects the monthly average and occasionally wrecks a single month. One person abroad without the right bolt-on can produce a four figure line on an otherwise ordinary bill.
Two controls fix most of it: spend caps per line, and a habit of telling your provider before anyone travels. Our guides to roaming charges and daily rates and telling your provider before you travel cover what each network charges and where the fair use caps bite.
When switching is the answer
Sometimes it genuinely is. Switch when:
- Coverage is wrong for where your people work. No tariff change fixes a weak signal. Different users can sit on different networks on one account.
- You have grown past your agreement. Above roughly twenty lines pricing starts being built for your account rather than taken off a list.
- Your provider will not pool data, or will not tell you what the commission and terms actually are.
- Support is the problem. If every change takes three calls and a queue, that is a real cost even though it never appears on the bill.
But fix the account first. Switching a messy account simply moves the mess, and you will sign a new term with the same waste baked in.
We will do the audit for you
Send a recent bill. We will tell you which lines belong to people who have left, which bundles are the wrong size, whether your data should be pooled, and what the account should cost. We will do it whether or not you move to us, and if you are already on a good deal we will say so.