Find Lumen Billing Problems with Audit Rules

The Audit tab checks every charge on your invoices against your inventory, your contracts, and a set of audit rules. Anything that looks wrong becomes an exception, so you can see exactly where you may be overbilled. At the top you'll see how many exceptions are open, the dollars at stake, and how many are already disputed. Next to them is when the audit last ran, the period it covered, and how many findings were new or cleared.

Each card is one audit rule, with its code, severity, the number of open exceptions, and the amount at stake. For example: billed but not in inventory, duplicate charges, monthly charges above your contracted rate, late fees, and services that have gone month to month. Click a card to see only that rule's exceptions, and click it again to clear the filter. You can also search by finding, billing account, service, or invoice, and filter by status, from open through disputed, accepted, resolved, and cleared, or by severity.

The total and the amount at stake update as you filter. Click an exception to open it. You'll see its status, the billing account and month, what was expected versus what was billed, and the difference at stake. Below that are links to the invoice or charge it came from, the evidence the rule used, and any notes.

Administrators work the list: they accept a charge that's correct, mark it disputed, or resolve it once it's credited. They can also select several exceptions and create a dispute, which then appears in the Recovery tab. As a finance user, you see the same list and every decision made on it. At the bottom, Rules and thresholds shows how each rule is configured: whether it's on, the percentage and dollar thresholds a difference must pass before it's flagged, its severity, and any billing accounts it's limited to.

Contract rates lists the monthly rates you've agreed for each product and bandwidth. The rule that checks charges against your contracted rate uses this table. That's the Audit tab: rules that find billing problems, a filterable list of exceptions, and the detail behind each one. Next, we'll follow disputes and savings in the Recovery tab.