Mike Andrews, senior cost management consultant from Auditel, the national cost management consultancy, shares some light hearted stories from the world of cost cutting and illustrates how some simple research can save businesses thousands.

How to score an own goal
• I was asked by a client to audit the phone bills, we found expensive calls to premium line numbers. I reported this to the FD who said we should investigate. We rang the number expecting to hear some erotic male or female making suggestive comments. Instead it was the Arsenal hot line. The person that was making all these calls was in fact the MD!

Video killed the radio star
• One client wondered why his phone bills were totalling £4,500 a month. I discovered that the numbers for a national radio station and a primetime quiz show were appearing on a daily basis on this company’s bills.

Everybody needs good neighbours
• One unusual story about fuel bills concerns a client paying for their neighbour’s energy bill by mistake. This came about as a leading energy company had sent the neighbour a cheque for £2,000 as a refund by mistake and the neighbour had cashed it. I was called in to recover the money. I fought tooth and nail and managed to trace the cheque the client had paid the bill with. Eventually the energy company coughed up another £2,000 for my client.

The mistake came about due to the wrong address being used on the envelope, although both were very similar. My client was No. 1 XYZ Road, the neighbour’s office was Unit 1, XYZ Industrial Estate, XYZ Road. My tip is to check that the post office and your suppliers have your correct postal address.

Lights on but no one’s at home
• A rugby league club had a campaign to cut energy and installed lots of monitoring equipment to ensure lights were switched off at night. A few weeks later the night usage increased. Further investigation revealed that the night security guard was scared of the dark and so turned all the lights back on!

You get what you pay for or do you?
• I was called in to solve the mystery of why a careers office had such high electricity usage. Investigations revealed they were paying for the electricity at the fire station next door!

Light bulb moment
• Finally a client who worked at an energy company in the days when energy saving light bulbs were new and expensive said one of his colleagues worked out a cost justification for fitting energy savings light bulbs. He then got the investment from the board, was asked to report back on savings and found that all of the high priced energy saving light bulbs had been stolen and substituted with standard bulbs!