Spend Management

CMG Spend Management is focused on reducing costs and controlling expenses in many of your frequently overlooked back-office and internal operational spend categories. CMG implements "Best-in- Class" cost reduction and control programs that will audit, measure, benchmark and optimize your administrative spend.

Key areas of spend such as Real Estate, Legal, and Office Supplies & Services are all necessary for day-to-day operations, but can result in significant overhead. Through our proprietary tools and uncommon expertise, we have been able to provide our clients transparency into underlying fees and contractual agreements.

Our solutions result in immediate savings that go directly to your bottom line, as well as ongoing controls that allow them to more effectively manage spend and improve efficiency.

Real Estate

Real Estate occupancy costs are typically one of the largest expenditures for most companies. In the majority of commercial real estate leases, tenants are required to pay for their share of building operating expenses, taxes and utilities. These obligations are deeply within into the lease language and are often complex and therefore too time consuming to analyze and manage the costs.

What is a lease audit?

Cost Management Group's Lease Audit team will complete a thorough analysis of these charges to ensure that they are consistent with the lease language. Our process is an intensive analysis of these charges, and includes an investigation as to underlying intent, scrutiny of lease wording, a comparison of costs to market rates, and a review of the landlord's books and records.

The audit also involves the presentation of claims and findings to the landlord and the recovery of overpayments. Cost Management Group takes pride in our ability to handle claims while maintaining an excellent landlord-tenant relationship. Our professional approach is based on ensuring our claims are valid, supportable, well documented and are presented with our Clients' prior knowledge and approval.

Legal Cost Reduction

Excessive and unnecessary legal expenses can cause serious financial problems for companies. Cost Management Group's Legal Audit consists of the review and analysis of the professional billing of legal fees and expenses. It involves a thorough review and analysis of all billings for an individual matter or a group of files. The legal audit can be performed on either an ongoing or completed matter, depending on the circumstances. Companies can benefit financially by identifying legal billing problems and inconsistencies that can threaten the bottom line.

The objective of a legal audit is to review such items as:

• The accuracy of fees and expenses of the firm's prior billing statements.
• Identify and quantify the billing entries, activities, and fees that appear excessive, duplicated, inadequately documented or otherwise ambiguous.

Identify expense items billed by the law firm that are generally considered law firm overhead or do not appear to directly relate to the matter.