Are there cracks in your water invoices? You could be pouring profits away!
May 28th 2010 Processing hundreds of water invoices each year is a time consuming thankless task. There are 27 different UK water suppliers each with their own billing formats and frequencies making uniform bill checking extremely challenging.
As much as energy consumers love to complain about their gas and power suppliers,at least they operate in an industry where competition has driven improvements in billing consistency and quality.Water on the other hand is not as straight-forward; with 27 suppliers it’s no wonder that water often gets left low on your priority list.
A large consumer spending around £15million a year on their water bills, which represents only 6% of their total utility spend, said that “Water makes up by far the greatest proportion of their daily headaches.When dealing with invoice queries or managing new accounts few suppliers will recognise a key customer as anything more than an individual site which is an enormous drain on our resources”.It doesn’t take long to see why your accounts departments are sometimes confused when it comes to paying their invoices. Add to this the all too frequent final demands which require urgent resolution and you have a process which requires far more attention than its value commands.
Before being able to get to grips with water expenditure it is essential that you are validating your invoices from the correct starting point.
Auditing water accounts will in most cases uncover historical anomalies and overcharges that can not only provide a useful influx of money to fund additional water efficiency projects, but also ensures that your portfolio information is accurate and up to date. This is an exercise that a surprising number of clients have never carried out,and yet can return considerable benefits.
But discovering overcharges is just the start. Once a complete and accurate set of data has been created for your portfolio you can start to look at inconsistencies in consumption and identify sites for investigation.After all the best way to spend less is to use less.Does your company currently know when, where and how much water they are using? If the answer is no, then how can you expect to reduce it?
Having no choice of supplier, no ability to negotiate charges, and a very small voice when it comes to challenging service levels means managing your water spend takes you outside standard ‘buying’ territory leaving many Energy and Water managers resigned to the fact that they have to accept the way things are. The promise of bringing competition benefits to the consumer has appeared to most to be just that, a promise – Something Encore believe is unacceptable.
Top of the list of issues for water consumers was the shear volume of information eating into their resources, one commenting “reducing the flow of superfluous data landing on my desk is a number one priority.What I want is one steady flow of information,in a format I understand and that can be of real use to me and my accounts team.I want an expert in water charges to check invoices are correct,validate for payment and resolve any queries”.
Encore’s ABC approach covers all this and more:
Auditing Historical Invoices: The first place to start when looking at your water expenditure, is to review your historical position and expenditure,making sure you recover what is rightfully yours.
Bureau, Validation and Reporting: Each piece of data available needs to be fully evaluated for accuracy,and then utilised to ensure you drive maximum value from your spend.
Competition:Understanding what opportunities are available to your business could turn out to be a very rewarding exercise.Ofwat and the Consumer Council for Water are useful allies in getting your voice heard – Encore represents their clients at both.
These three building blocks are issues that every organisation should be looking at; don’t be a water melon – getting the basics right is important regardless who you decide is best suited to help you. More articles from Encore Internation: | 
