How Much NetEx Are You Leaving on the Table?
By Frank McDermott, CEO
Most telecom operators are leaving significant network expense (NetEx) recovery on the table.
The gap between what operators typically recover and what's actually recoverable is one of the most persistent, and underestimated, financial challenges in digital infrastructure. In my experience, the difference between high-performing teams and average ones almost always comes down to one thing: whether their inventory data can be trusted.
The Numbers Tell the Story
The contrast I've seen repeatedly across operators looks something like this:
At most organizations, it takes 20 people an entire year to recover ~$100k in NetEx.
But when you clean up your data with a centralized tool, that changes. At Carma, we can mine $100k in NetEx every week with a team of four people.
Same work. Roughly 40x the output. But it’s not a people problem, it’s a process and system problem.
When I founded Carma, closing this gap is exactly what we set out to solve. But first, it's worth understanding why the gap exists because it shows up in ways most finance and revenue leaders don't immediately recognize.
Are You Eating Soup with a Fork?
The first component of this problem is a disconnect between the systems companies are using to get work done and what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
There’s a “best of breed” mindset that is quite common when purchasing software. You pick the tool that claims to be the best at its specific function.
But that’s the problem: You end up having software for individual functions but they don’t connect end-to-end.
In inventory management, there’s a constant cycle of selling assets, consuming them, and eventually releasing them. When we use fragmented systems to manage that process, that’s how you end up with bad data. When these processes break down, you don’t disco NetEx or you might install services and not bill for them. That then becomes a vicious cycle of NetEx and OpEx burn and requires additional investment and time to fix.
All that financial waste gets worse when you use systems that aren’t really built for the telecom. Our workflows and inventory are incredibly complex. Using a tool that isn’t really fit for purpose is like eating soup with a fork. Those systems might be great tools in another context, but they won’t necessarily get you the predictable outcomes you want.
The cure to all this is to:
Invest in a system that replaces ones that aren’t fit for purpose OR
Find a system that can actually stitch your tech stack together in a way that fixes your data silos
Inaccurate Inventory Data Has a Compounding Cost
So, why is data integrity so important? When inventory records can't be trusted, every downstream function pays:
Sales can't quote confidently without a site survey to verify what's actually available
Operations sends field teams to locate ports, confirm capacity, or re-verify what the system should already know
Finance bills against incomplete records, missing revenue that exists but isn't visible
Leadership makes capacity and growth decisions on stale data that doesn't reflect reality
Every unnecessary site visit, every repeated truck roll, every manual re-verification is operational expense (OpEx) that compounds quietly over time. And it all traces back to the same root cause: inventory data that people don't trust enough to act on.
Truck rolls aren't just an operational cost. They're a signal. Every time someone says "let me go check," that's a data failure and it hits your bottom line.
NetEx Recovery Is a Stress Test for Inventory Accuracy
Network expense recovery (identifying and reclaiming vendor expenses tied to assets and services) is one of the clearest measures of inventory integrity in the business. If your asset records don't match what's really deployed and billed, recovery becomes a manual, fragmented hunt.
When inventory is accurate and connected to billing, recovery becomes systematic.
Your team stops hunting and starts harvesting. The same data integrity that eliminates unnecessary site visits is what catches unbilled services, closes billing gaps, and gives finance a real-time view of what's owed versus what's collected.
What Changes When You Can Trust Your Data
Operators who have solved this describe a fundamentally different operating environment:
Quotes built from live inventory eliminate the need for site surveys
Live port availability becomes visible in the system, not discovered in the field
Billing gets tied to actual assets and kilowatts, not approximations
NetEx recovery runs continuously, not as a periodic project
Truck rolls and manual verification become the exception, not the norm
Required headcount drops and revenue recovered climbs
The Real Question for Finance and Revenue Leaders
How much NetEx is sitting uncollected right now because your inventory and billing records don't match?
How many truck rolls last month started with "let me go check"?
How many quotes were delayed—or lost—because the data wasn't there to support them?
These are data problems with direct financial consequences. And they're solvable.
That's what Carma was built to do: turn fragmented infrastructure data into a unified operating model so your team spends time on recovery and delivery—not verification.
Want to see how Carma fixes system silos and connects your inventory data to revenue? Request a demo today.