Background
Business Stream is a water retailer operating in the UK’s deregulated water market. It supplies water and waste water services to over 300,000 businesses, making it one of the UK’s largest water retailers.
Consultus has been working with Business Stream since 2020, following their successful bid to retain the Public Sector Scotland Water and Waste Water Services Framework Contract, the largest single water contract in the UK.
The Challenge
Following the deregulation of the water supply market in the UK in 2017, it became apparent quite quickly that there was a need to improve the accuracy of data in the market. For customers to have trust and confidence in their suppliers, accurate and timely invoices are key.
The Scottish Public Sector contract covers over 15,000 sites. Committed to providing accurate billing to their customers, Business Stream’s successful bid included a guarantee that invoices would be independently verified for accuracy by a third party, as an additional layer of due diligence. Consultus was invited by Business Stream to tender for a four-year water bill validation service to support this commitment.
Our proposal included solutions to validate the water bills of 10%, 15% and 50% of the 15,000 sites. We also had to demonstrate our ability to carry out a bulk validation exercise for historic bills, in addition to providing an ongoing service to validate a smaller number of invoices.
The Solution
In addressing the issue of data accuracy since the market’s deregulation, Consultus has led from the front, building a reputation for transparency that has been recognised by Business Stream and the wider market.
Central to this is our invoice validation software, developed in-house by our Research & Development and Software teams. We developed the first version of this software, Valor, specifically for the validation of water bills in a bid to address the market’s accuracy issues. Valor was the first known automation system for the mass validation of water bills.
Continual development of our software means Valor has now been replaced by Shield, our proprietary software designed to validate and compare tariffs, not just for the water industry, but across multiple utilities and industries.
Shield has the ability to run thousands of invoice lines in a matter of minutes. Users are then able to generate a variety of reports to analyse the data through Microsoft Power BI with which Shield is harmonised.
As part of our tender bid in 2020, we offered Business Stream the option of a ‘light’ or a ‘full’ validation service:
Light Validation Service (standard checks)
- Missing period
- Charge missing
- Incorrect charge
- Charge total error
- Rate error
- Charge error
- VAT rate
- VAT total
- Invoice total
- Zero usage
Full validation service (advanced usage checks)
- Overlap period
- Usage previous invoice
- Estimated invoices
- Negative usage
- Meter clocked
- Meter units changed
- Meter read conflict
- Missing meter read
- Meter read usage
Business Stream opted for the ‘full version’, to support their commitment to providing accurate billing and to better meet their customers’ needs.
Outcomes
We won the contact following a competitive tendering process and successfully validated just short of 60,000 invoices. They were received in batches, the largest of which contained 27,000 lines of data. With over 95% of the bills confirmed as accurate, Business Stream could provide assurances to their customers that their invoices were correct, as well as be well placed to quickly resolve any issues with the remaining 5% where data queries were identified.
Compared to manual validation, our Shield software achieves 85% efficiency and a cost ratio saving of 1:3. This allows us to focus our time on producing world class reports and query resolution, providing real value for our clients.
Following the success of our first contract to support Business Stream with our water bill validation service, we were invited to tender again. In 2025, we were once again appointed by Business Stream to provide our bill validation services. On this occasion we were able to process just short of 15,000 invoices overnight. We worked together to resolve any identified data queries, before confirming an overall accuracy rating of 98%, providing peace of mind and confidence to Business Stream and their customers.
Testimonial from Business Stream
“As a water retailer, it’s vital that we provide our customers with accurate billing. We’ve invested in our partnership with Consultus to add an additional layer of due diligence to our processes, enabling us to reassure our customers that their bills have been externally validated and are accurate.”