Energy Audit
In order to establish whether the charges invoiced by your suppliers past and present are correct, it is necessary to undertake a retrospective examination of the billing and data relating to your energy accounts.
- The audit is invaluable in building a history of your accounts and can often uncover billing issues that result in large refunds.
- It will also highlight any areas where measures can be taken to achieve future savings.
- We oversee the administration of any amendments to the billing or metering that may be necessary.
- We ensure that any overcharges that may have occurred are refunded.
The wide range of possibilities where overcharges can occur will be investigated.
Most companies will have an accounts department or a chartered accountant to check the energy invoices before they are paid, but this is not just an exercise in making sure that:
a + b = c; it is whether a and b are correct to begin with.
Our background in testing and validating billing systems enables us to identify issues that would otherwise go unnoticed.
On completion, a full report is produced detailing our conclusions and recommendations.
The utility industry has always had its problems with billing issues, but, prior to deregulation, this was only at a regional level because the electricity industry was divided up into 14 regional electricity boards. The deregulation of the energy industry has enabled suppliers to operate nationally and therefore errors and faults occur on a scale not previously experienced.
Our involvement in the field of auditing energy accounts has uncovered an extraordinary range of overcharges in what is, relatively, only a small fraction of the business customers in this country. The total amount that must be currently owed by suppliers for unidentified overcharges is unquantifiable.
The systems that produce your gas and electricity invoices are not perfect; in fact they are far from it. There are many reasons for this, one is that billing systems can be compromised by their own programmes, which reject readings considered to fall outside their billing parameters (exceptions), thereby allowing billing errors to consolidate and grow. Although exceptions are generated when incorrect or what is deemed to be incorrect data is received; by generating estimated system invoices, which some suppliers do, the process of identifying exceptions is rendered pointless. Some suppliers simply run programs to delete such exceptions due to the sheer volume of them that are generated by their own systems. We are also aware of systems applying incorrect reading types, which give validity to data which is false, thereby leading to billing issues.
Further examples are: the data held on billing systems can become corrupted as a result of metering becoming faulty, incorrect readings, the migration of data between billing systems, the transfer of data between suppliers and the registration of data on national databases. If you then add lack of knowhow, misunderstanding or, the most basic, typing errors by supplier personnel, the opportunity for billing errors is apparent.
An audit of your energy accounts is the only way to be sure that you are not being overcharged.