Why EOFY Is the Right Time to Review Your Telecom Spend
- Jun 1
- 4 min read
FY26 is closing. FY27 budgets are being built. Here’s why telecom deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.
Every year, at around this time, finance teams across Australian enterprises go through the same process. FY26 actuals are reconciled. Category budgets are submitted for FY27. Forecasts are stress-tested. Senior leaders ask hard questions about the numbers.
Telecom rarely gets the same scrutiny as other categories.
It sits in the indirect spend portfolio, approved monthly without detailed review, managed across multiple carriers and teams with no single owner. The total looks reasonable. It gets carried into the next financial year.
That is how overspend compounds quietly. And why end of financial year is exactly the right time to stop and look at it properly.
The Budget Cycle Problem
Most FY27 telecom budgets will be built by applying a percentage movement to FY26 actuals. That is a sensible starting point — when the FY26 number is accurate.
The problem is that telecom actuals almost always contain cost that shouldn’t be there. Legacy services still billing after infrastructure changes. Mobile plans misaligned with actual usage. Contracts on rollover at rates that no longer reflect the market. Billing errors that passed through accounts payable undetected.
When those costs are embedded in FY26, they get carried into FY27. Not as a deliberate decision — simply because nobody looked.
The question isn’t whether your FY26 telecom number is accurate. The question is whether anyone has ever independently verified that it is.
Why Telecom Specifically
Most indirect spend categories have natural review points. Professional services engagements end. Facilities contracts come up for renewal. Travel budgets get scrutinised against policy.
Telecom is different. Carriers auto-renew contracts. Services accumulate over years across different teams and vendors. Billing is complex, fragmented across multiple invoices and structured in ways that obscure true cost. No single team owns the full picture.
The result is a category that gets negotiated once — sometimes years ago — and then runs on autopilot.
• Mobile fleet plans set at hire, never reviewed against actual usage patterns
• Data circuits billing for offices that have been closed or consolidated
• Legacy ISDN or PSTN lines still active after a migration to SIP or UCaaS
• Contracts past their expiry date, rolling on original terms with no benchmarking
• Billing errors sitting undetected across carrier invoices approved in aggregate
Each of these is common. Each compounds quietly. And each shows up in the FY26 actuals that are about to become the FY27 baseline.
What EOFY Creates — A Natural Review Mandate
End of financial year is the one moment in the budget cycle when the question “what is actually in this number?” has a natural audience.
Finance is looking at actuals. Procurement is reviewing category performance. CIOs are justifying technology spend to executives. CFOs are asking whether budgets are defensible.
For telecom, that scrutiny rarely goes deep enough. But the mandate is there. The question is whether anyone uses it.
Organisations that review their telecom environment at EOFY do two things simultaneously: they close FY26 with a clear picture of what they’ve actually spent, and they build FY27 budgets on numbers they can defend.
What a Review at This Point Actually Delivers
An independent telecom review completed before or around 30 June delivers three things that are directly relevant to the budget cycle.
1. FY26 actuals you can explain
A structured service review maps every active telecom service to its cost, location, usage and contract status. It identifies what is legitimate spend and what is not. It gives finance a defensible number — not just an approved one.
2. Recoverable value before the year closes
Billing credits — money owed back by carriers for errors, overcharges or services that billed past their cancellation date — are recoverable. But they need to be identified and claimed. An EOFY review surfaces these before the year closes, giving the organisation the opportunity to recover FY26 value in FY26.
Across CDK engagements, billing credit recoveries have ranged from tens of thousands to over $364,000 in a single engagement.
3. A FY27 budget built on verified numbers
When the FY26 number has been reviewed, redundant services removed, and contracts benchmarked, the FY27 baseline is accurate. That means the FY27 budget reflects what telecom should cost — not what it has historically cost because nobody questioned it.
How Long Does a Review Take
The honest answer depends on the complexity of the environment. In large, multi-site organisations with multiple carriers, a full independent review typically takes four to eight weeks to complete properly.
Which means the window to complete a review before 30 June is narrow. Organisations that want FY26 outcomes to inform their FY27 budget need to start that conversation now.
For organisations that want a faster starting point, the CDK Overspend Exposure Score provides an immediate risk assessment — 20 questions, under 10 minutes, free. It tells you where the risk is most likely to sit before committing to a full review.
Key Takeaways
FY27 telecom budgets built on FY26 actuals inherit whatever overspend is embedded in those actuals
Telecom is the indirect spend category least likely to have been independently reviewed
EOFY creates a natural mandate for the scrutiny that telecom rarely receives during the year
Billing credits are recoverable — but only if the review happens before or shortly after year end
The window to act before 30 June is narrow. The starting point is understanding where the risk sits.
If your organisation is closing FY26 with a telecom number you can’t fully explain, that’s the conversation worth having before the year ends.
Or contact us directly for an independent telecom review:
CDK Telecommunications — Independent | Carrier-Agnostic | Enterprise-Focused