If You Closed a Store in 2023, You Might Still Be Paying for It
You know exactly which locations you closed. Facilities knows. Real estate knows. HR processed the last transfers. The lease is terminated. The keys are returned.
But the telecom circuits at that location? There’s a good chance they’re still active. The carrier is still billing for them. And nobody on your team flagged it—because nobody on your team owns the carrier-side decommission.
This isn’t an edge case. It’s a pattern I’ve seen at every multi-site enterprise I’ve worked with.
The Gap Nobody Assigned
Every multi-site enterprise has a store closure process. It covers fixtures, inventory, lease obligations, staffing, and signage. What it almost never covers is telecom decommission—the formal notification to every carrier serving that location that service should be terminated and billing should stop.
The reason is structural. Telecom sits between IT and finance. IT owns the technology decisions. Finance processes the invoices. Neither one owns the carrier relationship at the operational level—which means neither one is accountable for confirming that a closed location’s circuits are disconnected and no longer billing.
The carrier has no incentive to fix this. A circuit that remains active after a location closes is revenue to them. They will not call you to ask why traffic dropped to zero. They will not flag that an address in their billing system matches a closed location on your facilities list. They will continue invoicing until someone on your side formally requests disconnection—and confirms the final invoice reflects it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
We worked with a multi-brand retail portfolio—over 200 locations across multiple carriers. When we ran a line-by-line validation of their telecom billing against their active location inventory, we found circuits billing to addresses that had been closed for months. Not a handful of exceptions. A pattern, across carriers and across brands.
The total unauthorized charges identified across that engagement: $270,122. Of that, $25,416 is in active dispute. The remaining $244,706 is contingent on pending legal proceedings unrelated to the billing itself. The client’s approved telecom budget dropped 16.9% from the prior fiscal year (FY24 vs. FY25)—not because they cut services, but because we identified charges that should never have appeared on the invoice.
This Is Not a Cost Problem
I want to be direct about something: if you’re framing closed-store billing as a savings opportunity, you’re looking at it wrong.
These are unauthorized charges. The carrier is billing for services your organization no longer consumes at locations your organization no longer occupies. That’s not an optimization target. It’s a governance failure. And the longer it goes unaddressed, the harder it becomes to dispute.
Most carrier contracts have a 60- to 90-day dispute window. If you closed a location 18 months ago and the circuits are still billing, you may be able to dispute the most recent charges. But the months that fell outside that window? That exposure has likely passed the point where you can recover it contractually. It’s gone.
The Fix Is Operational, Not Heroic
Every store closure should trigger a telecom decommission checklist: identify every circuit serving that location, notify each carrier formally and in writing, confirm disconnection with a dated acknowledgment, validate the final invoice for post-disconnect charges, and dispute any billing that appears after the confirmed disconnect date.
The question is who owns that checklist. If the answer is “nobody”—or worse, “we assume facilities handles it”—then you have a governance gap that is generating unauthorized charges every month at every location you’ve closed.
This is solvable. Not with a project. With a process.
