When a manager leaves the company, telecom invoices that were routed to them personally either bounce, get filtered as suspicious, or land in an inbox nobody is monitoring. The company keeps getting billed, but the company stops paying. A few billing cycles later, service gets cut off. This is one of the most common causes of unexpected site disconnections in enterprise environments, and it is entirely preventable.
The reason it keeps happening is that a lot of vendor relationships are still personal. A carrier rep has a contact. That contact ordered a service. That contact gets the invoice. When the contact leaves the company, the vendor does not automatically know to send the invoice somewhere else. And the internal process that should catch it does not exist, or does not run reliably.
Why Does This Keep Happening?
Consider what typically happens when a manager exits:
- Their email account is deactivated or forwarded to a manager who does not recognize the invoice.
- The vendor tries to email the invoice, gets a bounce, and marks the account as “invoice delivery failed.”
- The vendor calls the number on file. Same person. No answer.
- The vendor keeps generating invoices. They pile up.
- Eventually, the service goes into non-payment status.
- Eventually, the service gets suspended.
- Somebody’s site loses connectivity, and the discovery process begins.
At no point in that sequence does anyone in finance know there is a problem. The invoice never entered the finance system, because it was going to a personal address, not a central intake. The circuit may or may not be in the corporate inventory. If it is not, there is no way to know it exists until it stops working.
A Real Scenario
An engineering manager at a mid-sized company ordered a dedicated internet circuit for a distribution facility. He was the technical contact. He was the billing contact. The invoices came to his corporate email. He approved them, forwarded them to AP, and the process worked fine.
He took a role at another company. His email was set to auto-reply for a week, then deactivated. The next month’s invoice bounced. The one after that bounced. By month four, the circuit was in disconnection status. Nobody at the distribution facility knew until the connection went down on a Monday morning during peak inbound receiving.
Cost of the missed invoices: about $2,800. Cost of the outage, the emergency reconnection fee, the overtime, and the lost productivity: significantly more.
How to Eliminate the Risk of Missed Payments When Employees Change Roles
The short answer is that no invoice should ever be routed to an individual person’s email address. Ever. The medium answer is that you need a system that does not depend on any single human to function.
Here is what needs to be true:
- Vendors send invoices to a central intake, not to individuals. If a vendor insists on emailing an individual, the vendor needs to be reonboarded.
- Every account is documented in a master invoice schedule that expects invoices on a specific cadence.
- If an expected invoice does not arrive, the system flags it. Not “eventually.” Within days.
- Every circuit is in an inventory that is tied to the account, the vendor, and a business owner. When the business owner leaves, the ownership transfers automatically to their replacement or to their manager.
- Vendor contact information gets audited at least annually. The person you list as the billing contact today should still work at the company, and the email should still route to a monitored destination.
The Broader Point
Institutional knowledge is a liability, not an asset. Every time you hear “well, Steve knows how that works,” write it down. Steve will not be there forever. Steve knowing how it works is a governance problem, not a solution.
A well-run TEM program removes that dependency entirely. The invoices come in through automation. The circuits are documented in the inventory. The contracts are indexed. The disputes are logged. Steve can leave tomorrow and the process keeps running.
That is what “reducing dependency on institutional knowledge” actually means. It is not documentation. It is a system that captures operational reality so the knowledge lives in the platform, not in a person.
If you want to know how many of your vendor relationships still route to individual employees, AMI can pull a free service provider inventory report and show you exactly where the exposure is. It is one conversation and it takes about a week.
David Sonenstein - Vice President of Product Strategy
AMI Strategies
With over 20 years in the industry, David helps orchestrate AMI’s vision for vendor hyperautomation. While contributing to AMI’s adoption of automation technologies, system integrations and technology frameworks, his research focuses on enterprise market and technology trends and where automation solutions can help organizations achieve their desired business outcomes. He currently serves on the executive board of the Enterprise Technology Management Association (ETMA) and is an associate of the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council.
