Communicating with events inside of an object

Hey guys,

I'm pretty new to AS3, it's been a while since I've really dealt with actionscript, so I'm trying to get back into it.

I've set up a class which is associated with a movie clip on the stage. The class uses a timer event. I have set up an event handler that calls a function to manipulate different parameters of the movie clip (mostly the x and y coordinates) on the stage. This works pretty effectively however I'm now at the point where I would like to test collisions between different objects on the stage. I'm wondering how I can communicate with an object's timer from the stage itself, in order to perform various tests as the object moves. I'm sure I could create another timer on the stage, which runs these checks, however it seems rather inefficient, considering each object already has its own timer.

Any ideas?

Thanks