Audit Services: is your business owed money?
Electricity and gas suppliers are notorious for errors in billing. There may be human mistakes, such as keying in the wrong information, or computer errors generated because of complicated systems. Either way, they can cost customers from a few pence to thousands of pounds.
Every year, suppliers generate thousands of bills with errors. But how can you tell that your bill doesn’t contain mistakes? And how much are the mistakes costing you?
The problem is that most businesses don’t know if their billing is accurate and they have no way to check. What’s more, most can’t be sure they are even on the best tariff for their needs.
Cost Centre Services has developed an innovative service to audit your energy bills. It’s independent and it’s free, so you have nothing to lose.
The Historical Audit Service looks at past billing, over an agreed, pre-determined period.
The Ongoing Audit Service monitors current billing. It maintains a watching brief during the life of current contracts for energy supply or other services and utilities.
The concept and principles are exactly the same, regardless of the supplier being investigated or the type of audit being undertaken. The audit covers an in-depth review of tariffs, charging structures and the compilation criteria of each invoice.
The number and scale of errors can be serious: for example in a nine month period, around £160,000 was recovered on behalf of six new clients who had been overcharged by their energy suppliers. Regular refunds and corrections are obtained every month by way of the Ongoing Audit Service.
If mistakes have been made, a full refund (sometimes even compensation) is paid directly to the client by the incumbent supplier. Cost Centre Services pursues the supplier and carries out all associated work in return for either a share of the refund or an hourly fee rate.
Auditing suppliers’ bills is essential – especially energy suppliers, who have a history of billing errors. Remember: ‘If you don’t look, you can’t find.’
