Heading into the new financial year can feel like a transitional time – in one way we’re all looking at the weather change and spring FINALLY arriving, but in another we’re aware that another tax year has closed and our corporate budgets reset. That makes it the perfect moment to review your contracts and make sure they are setup correctly so as not to incur any unnecessary charges for the year ahead.
So, let’s talk about ways in which you can keep the costs down on your business mobile contract for FY 2026/27. In this blog, we’ll discuss three ways you can help to keep your bills predictable:
- Implement a cost cap
- Audit your regular usage
- Track your key contract dates
Top tip: everything discussed in today’s blog can either be activated or investigated through the My O2 business portal. If you haven’t setup your login yet, you can do so here: https://www.o2.co.uk/business/myo2business
Implement a cost cap
Ever had a bill which made your eyes come out on stalks when you opened it? Not a nice feeling, is it?
There is one very simple way to keep costs under control which is available to all O2 business customers from day one. The spend cap.
This simple setting lets you set an overspend limit on your regular bill to keep out-of-bundle costs for data, calls, and texts within a set parameter. These limits can be set to one of the following options; £0, £5, £10, £15, £20, £30, £50, £75, £100, or £200.
How does it work? Well, once a user hits their designated cap, the network automatically restricts out-of-bundle activities, such as premium rate calls or extra data usage, until the next billing cycle. This means no more worrying about unexpected costs at the end of the month!
To have a cap applied to your account, you can either get in touch with our customer support team who will apply it for you, or you can do it yourself through the My O2 business portal.
Audit your regular usage
Even with a cost cap in place, if you find yourself regularly spending more than your monthly tariff you could benefit from increasing your included allowances as a GB of data added in advance is often cheaper than one paid for as an addition.
Most providers will be happy to increase your limits during your contract, but it’s worth noting that in a lot of circumstances you can only decrease your included allowances at the end of your contract.
A great place to start is looking at how much of your existing plan you are currently using on the portal. Look out for things like are you regularly going over your limits, or are you simply not hitting them every month? Have you got multiple users on the contract but don’t have pooled allowances? Do you have one or two key power users that need a different tariff to the rest of your business?
These days most business contracts include unlimited minutes and calls, so when running this audit, you’ll want to focus mostly on data usage as that’s typically the key variable on a tariff. But whatever you do, it’s worth taking five minutes to go through all your usage charts and see if there’s any opportunity for you to save money.
You might be surprised at what you find.
Track your key contract dates
Finally, it can pay to keep track of and know the key dates for your contract. If I had to ask you right now, do you know when the finance agreement on your handset ends or when you are eligible to renew and review your current contract?
Don’t be ashamed if the answer is no – the answer for nearly all of us is no! But just because we may not know what the right answer is, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t know it. For two key reasons:
- By understanding when your finance agreements expire, you can better plan to either upgrade your handset(s) or reduce your tech spend
- By knowing when your contract is due to expire, you can understand how long you are fixed into your current payment plan and plan to increase or decrease this cost as you see fit at the earliest opportunity before moving onto a rolling contract
The key contract date for your tariff will be available in your My O2 business portal, but your handset finance agreement may not appear there if it was taken out with a third party such as Propel finance.
Conclusion
Truthfully these steps can be taken at any time, but the start of the new financial year as you are drawing up budgets for the coming 12 months can be the ideal time to check in on your business mobile contract and only paying for what you need.
So what are you waiting for? Login now to the My O2 business portal and get checking your usage and costs.