Glossary

The group

TEM

Telecom expense management: knowing what a group's connectivity costs, whether it was delivered, and whether it should still be paid for.

Group

Riopex's customer: a group of companies, set out as divisions between the group and its companies, with as many levels between them as it needs, named in its own words.

Company

A company of the group, and the boundary its data is kept inside. A record in one company cannot point at a record in another.

Division

A narrower list of companies, read under the same company boundary.

Grant

How access is held: one role over the group, some companies, or a division and every company under it, optionally limited to countries and given an expiry date.

The inventory

Service

What a provider bills for and delivers: a data, voice, mobile, hosting or satellite link. A bill line is bound to a service only by an identifier, never by a guess.

Committed rate

The rate a contract commits a link to carry: the line its chart draws hourly traffic against.

Circuit role

What a link is for, such as main, backup, DR, burst or seasonal. With the role-words rule on, a company's own words for its roles are mapped to them, and a word not yet mapped is flagged, not guessed.

Bundle

One provider charge that pays for several services. It is split to its member services when the bill is accepted: by bandwidth, equally, or all on its anchor service.

Carrier confirmation

Sending a provider what Riopex holds for it, as a CSV by email (or a CSV or XLSX download), and keeping its answer as evidence. The answer never overwrites the service; where it differs, a person decides.

Import

One file's run into the inventory: checked first as a dry run, then committed, and undone as one batch if it was wrong.

Column mapping

How a spreadsheet's columns are read. A person confirms it once, and it is reused when a file with the same headers arrives.

Bills and money

Source file

A bill file as it arrived, kept exactly so; no role can change it. The same file uploaded twice by one company is stored once.

Charge class

What a bill line is: recurring, usage, one-off, discount or tax. A charge that cannot be classified is kept and sent to review.

MRC

Monthly recurring charge. Only recurring charges and discounts, netted, enter the numerator of cost per megabit; usage, one-off fees and taxes stay out.

Arithmetic check

The check that a bill's lines add up to its total, and its tax lines to its stated tax. A bill that fails goes to review.

Minor units

How money is held: whole minor units of its own currency, so a currency with finer units, such as the Kuwaiti dinar, keeps its exact precision.

Functional currency

The currency a company keeps its books in. Each figure is held in it, beside the amount as billed.

Presentation currency

The currency the group reports in. Each figure is held in it too, so the group's total is summed from each bill's recorded conversion.

Exchange rate

Every converted figure names the rate that produced it. A rate is never changed; a corrected rate is a new record.

Frozen rate

The rate a month's figures are stated at, frozen for that month, so a later rate does not quietly change them.

FX policy

The group's rule for which rate type leads, which fall back in order, and how old a rate may be.

Restatement

A change to a closed month, recorded with its reason: a corrected rate, a corrected bill, a changed allocation or a changed metric.

Allocation rule

How a cost is split across the group's companies, in shares that add up exactly to the whole. Billed and allocated spend are shown side by side, never added into one figure.

Settlement status

Where a bill stands with the provider: paid, unpaid, on hold, wrong or disputed.

Bandwidth

Read-level key

The one credential Riopex asks of a monitoring system. Riopex only reads from monitoring and never writes to a device.

Interface binding

The link between a monitored interface and a service. An interface binds itself only on an exact identifier match; any other opens a task for a person. Rebinding never rewrites measured history.

Coverage

The share of a month's hours that were measured. An hour not measured stays missing, never zero, and a partly measured hour counts as only part of an hour.

p95

The percentile a link's month is read at, taken over its measured hours, inbound, outbound and both ways, and named for its hourly bucket.

Cost per megabit delivered

A link's recurring monthly cost divided by its month's p95, worked out only when enough of the month was measured.

Cost per megabit subscribed

The same recurring cost divided by the link's committed speed. The Overview compares it across the group, with the delivered figure beside it once enough of the month is measured.

Findings and disputes

Finding

A difference the files show, such as a charge with no service, a service with no charge or a price off its contract, worked on its own page. Its severity is measured against its own company's spend for the month.

Ghost circuit

A service disconnected but still billed. A completed disconnect is checked against later bills, and a charge still billed opens a finding citing the provider's reference.

Low utilisation

A link that runs well below its committed rate over a full billing period. It opens a finding only when its role, contract, monitoring coverage and billing history all allow it.

Held-back finding

A finding held back, for a backup link, an unknown role or thin monitoring among other reasons, and kept with its reason, never silently dropped.

Dispute

A claim against a billed charge, citing a finding, a bill line or a bill. It moves from raised to acknowledged and closes as credited, denied or withdrawn; it may claim less than the charge, never more.

Credit

Money a provider grants back, matched to the dispute that earned it when it lands on a later bill.

Rebate

A rate a contract pays back on its billed spend, flat, tiered or growth-based, never counting tax, credits or fees.

Orders and approvals

MACD

Moves, adds, changes and disconnects: requests that run through the group's approval policy, with install milestones recorded until the install is finished.

Approval policy

Who may raise a request and who approves each step, set for the whole group or for one company, for each kind of request.

Budget check

The step that sets what a request needs against the month's budget and records the exchange rate it used.

Early-termination charge

What ending a contract early costs, worked out from the contract and counted in a disconnect's budget check.

Notice deadline

The last day to give notice on a contract, worked out from its end date and notice period and rolled forward through each auto-renewal.

To do

One list of what waits on you: work items, open findings, disputes due a follow-up and bills marked wrong, each saying why it waits and who holds it.