Water Bill Validation

As a business, keeping operational costs to a minimum will always be a top priority – but, when it comes to your utility bills, it’s often all too easy to fall into the trap of simply accepting what you’re being charged for and not scrutinising the service to see if there are savings to be made.

This is especially true for water bills. The retail water market only opened its doors to businesses back in April 2017, allowing companies for the first time to choose their own business water supplier.

While the ability to switch supplier is certainly most welcome, commercial water bills can be incredibly difficult to interpret, involving lots of different tariffs based on volumetric charges, surface drainage, trade effluent, fixed charges and so on. As such, it can be very tricky to work out if you’re being billed correctly for your water and sewerage services.

Lack of in-depth knowledge all too often means you simply accept the status quo, but water bill validation can help you see whether you’re being over or under-charged, as well as revealing whether the service you’re receiving is fit for purpose and whether you could enjoy cost savings and better service provision with a different supplier.

What does water bill validation involve?

If you’re worried that you’re not being charged correctly for your water usage, you can opt for bill validation, which involves a review of your current and historical water bills (going back for at least the last 12 months), with all charges recalculated based on your wholesaler’s scheme of charges.

Once this has been carried out, you will be provided with a full report identifying any discrepancies in your billing. You may be eligible for historical rebates if you have been overcharged and you will also be provided with relevant recommendations to help you save money across your business site.

If you have multiple properties and multiple business sites, it can be even harder to work out if you’re on the right tariff, but validating your water bills site by site can help you build up a clearer picture of how you’re using water and where across your entire company.

What are the benefits of water bill validation?

There are all sorts of benefits associated with having your water bills validated, including:

• Greater peace of mind that you’re being charged appropriately for the volumes of water you use
• Potential historical rebates from your business water supplier
• Identifying weak areas across your site so you can bring in the appropriate water-saving solutions
• Avoiding mistakes with estimated billing in the future
• Better customer service
• The ability to identify water leaks, which could be wasting lots of water unwittingly, costing your business lots of money
• Ongoing monitoring of your bills to ensure that issues are identified quickly

Beyond saving your business money, becoming more water wise and engaging in water stewardship will only become more important as time goes on and the need to operate more sustainably becomes an evermore urgent issue.

If you’d like to find out how to save water and money across your business site, get in touch with the SwiftSwitch team today.