Finance sees network trouble before operations reports it, writes Backspace’s Elzette Cronje Jordaan.
The author, Elzette Cronje Jordaan, is head of finance at Backspace Technologies
Connectivity is the lifeblood of modern business. When companies are connected they can operate; when they are down they lose money. For telecoms providers, that makes uptime critical.
The status quo, though, is that uptime is treated as a technical issue. When a service goes down, the spotlight falls on engineers, infrastructure and upstream providers. That is technically sound, but it is reactive. Look closely at how the best-run operators in this country work and a different truth emerges: uptime is as much a financial question as a technical one.
The strongest early-warning system for network health — and for the health of the commercial arrangements underpinning it — does not sit exclusively with operations. It also sits with finance. While technicians watch the technical side, finance watches the same thing in numbers rather than IT metrics: revenue movements, credits, churn risk and cash flow.
In any telecoms environment, everything eventually flows through billing and finance — provisioning, configuration, sales pipelines against closed deals, support failures, upstream outages. All of it leaves fingerprints on revenue data. The monthly revenue report is an X-ray of what the organisation actually did that month.
If a billing rule is wrong, it shows up in the numbers. So does slow or inconsistent provisioning. If upstream relationships are mismanaged and outages drag on, it shows up as write-offs, credits and delayed collections.
That puts finance on the pulse of a telecoms provider. Yet most operators still treat it as a back-office function, there to balance the books, produce reports and keep Sars happy. In dealings with operators across the market it is often obvious that finance sits in a silo, disconnected from operations.
It is a missed opportunity. A properly empowered finance team has the clearest and most objective view of how the whole business is performing, and those insights translate into agility, responsiveness and ultimately better service.
When finance leaders are encouraged — and expected — to read the numbers operationally, they stop being historians. They start asking the questions that keep a business competitive.
Engineers talk about uptime in terms of redundancy, failover and service-level agreements. Finance talks about it in terms that keep boards awake:
Outages and upstream failures are a silent wrecking ball for cash flow. Every hour of downtime carries a measurable impact on collections, on churn risk and on an operator’s ability to honour its promises or reinvest in its systems.
In the best-run organisations, uptime and time-to-resolution sit on the finance dashboard as leading indicators of cash flow health.
An uncomfortable truth for the industry is that some outages are not technical failures at all. They are financial ones.
Telecoms value chains are stacked with intermediaries — upstream carriers, fibre operators, data centres, voice partners. Customers are often unaware of the commercial arrangements sitting behind their service, yet that service depends directly on how disciplined their provider is about paying for it.
When the economy tightens, some businesses treat stretching creditors as clever cash management. It is nothing of the sort. Upstream providers can and do cut services over delayed payments.
The most reliable providers make sure their finance leaders pay critical upstream suppliers on time, every time. The alternative is penalties, credits and churn. Creditor discipline is not an administrative footnote — it is an uptime strategy.
That discipline depends on cross-department collaboration, which telecoms operators are notoriously bad at. Engineering does not engage with billing. Sales does not grasp infrastructure constraints. Support is caught between promises and reality. Finance is expected to reconcile. The result is a quiet lethargy that gets expensive.
A finance team in a silo may well see the problem in the numbers, but it will not know what caused it. Embedded in operations, working alongside engineering, infrastructure and sales, finance gets a bird’s-eye view and can turn anomalies into precise questions:
Finance is the custodian of the early warnings hidden in the numbers, and it should be doing more than recording the damage after the fact.
End customers and resellers should ask their providers how their finance department operates. The answer will tell them more about long-term reliability than any service-level agreement will. Uptime does not belong only to the engineers. It belongs in the finance office too.
In a digital-first world, reliable connectivity is not optional — it is the foundation of how a business operates, communicates and grows. Backspace delivers scalable, high-performance connectivity designed to keep you connected, competitive and in control. Find out more.
