What was the challenge?
A leading industrial and commercial energy supplier set an ambitious goal to bill customers as close to the first day of each month as possible. The urgency behind this ambition stemmed from a significant financial opportunity: elongated billing was estimated to result in a lost interest opportunity of c£2 million annually. On average, customers were billed on the 15th of the month, with limited focus on high-value customers.
The underlying issue was a highly manual billing process reliant on multiple handoffs, Excel workarounds, and limited system automation. Teams across Operations, Risk, Sales, Billing, and Customer Services carried out overlapping checks and tasks, often duplicating effort without a clear ownership model. Additional challenges included delays caused by system capacity, bespoke contractual terms limiting standardisation, unclear prioritisation of billing activities, inconsistent third-party engagement, and inefficient handoffs across Microsoft Teams, emails, and spreadsheets.
With no single process owner and minimal system feedback on errors, the process was prone to delay, error, and wasted effort. The client sought Moorhouse’s expertise to identify blockers, recommend solutions, and design a path to accelerate billing while reducing operational inefficiency.
How did we help?
Moorhouse undertook a comprehensive review of the client’s end-to-end gas billing process, starting with stakeholder interviews and system walkthroughs to map the end-to-end workflow and highlight inefficiencies. Alongside this, we analysed billing data to quantify cycle times and identify process pain points within the workflow, particularly those that impacted the billing of high‑value customers.
Our recommendations focused on both structural and process improvements. First, we introduced a billing prioritisation methodology (a scoring system considering SLAs, revenue, number of meters, payment terms, and historic payment performance) to ensure the most valuable customers were billed first. We also removed delays linked to unnecessary review periods.
We created an accountability structure with a single owner for billing performance, supported by a mission control room with clear status updates and daily huddles to improve governance.
Finally, we identified opportunities for automation: cleansing monthly meter-read data that feeds into billing to reduce errors, empowering the billing team to generate its own billing outputs, and removing reliance on manual Excel processes. These steps offered both quick wins and longer-term transformation.
What was the impact?
The interventions defined and undertaken by Moorhouse provided a practical roadmap to accelerate billing, reduce inefficiencies, and capture lost revenue in annual interest. The impact of our initiatives was quickly visible. By applying the prioritisation methodology and streamlining handoffs, average billing days were reduced by >40% to Day+9, demonstrating significant progress towards the Day 1 billing ambition.
This acceleration equated to £800,000 in annualised savings.
In addition to this, the business now spend less time on billing and have more capacity for value-adding tasks. This includes simplification of billing reporting and reducing unnecessary handoffs. Meanwhile, the accountability model establishes clearer ownership, reducing fragmentation across departments and giving leaders end-to-end visibility.
Together, these improvements not only create immediate financial value but also lay the foundations for a scalable, system-driven billing model that maximises revenue, reduces manual burden, and brings the client closer to its ambition of billing customers as early as possible.
“Moorhouse helped us move from firefighting to a controlled, insight-driven billing process. Their approach combined operational rigour with practical solutions that made a measurable financial difference.”
Head of Billing, UK Energy Supplier
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