What is a Recharge Service?
Owners of multi-let buildings with centralised utilities (electricity, gas, water) or heat (CHW & LTHW) need to recover the cost from tenants to ensure each pays fairly for their own usage.
Directly apportioning costs via tenant recharges helps tenants understand their usage and incentivives engagement with sustainability drives. Issuing bills promptly and correctly is important for building tenant trust and maintaining prompt payments - vital for service charge cash flow given the growing cost of utilites.
A quality recharge service supports landlords and managing agents with their tenant recharging by producing clear and accurate invoices, however complex the situation.
Why use a specialist?
Avoid Errors
Recharging is a complex and nuanced task. While homemade spreadsheets often work well to begin with they can quickly encounter issues if there is a change of staff, tenant, metering or supplier. These errors often then go unnoticed for long periods of time creating reconciliation and cost recovery problems - particularly if a tenant has since moved out.
Our service is provided by dedicated industry professionals, experienced in anticipating and avoiding these pitfalls.
Save Time
Producing accurate recharges is a time-consuming process requiring high levels of focus. Home-grown systems require thorough checking, and often fall to already busy building managers or accounts teams.
Our service is designed to be as time saving as possible for building managers, accounts teams and ESG managers.
Access Experience
Recharging is a specialist area where small details can be vitally important. Additionally every building and meter provider is different, with its own quirks and requirements to be blended into the recharges.
We’ve worked on hundreds of different buildings and estates, both single assets and large portfolios, over the course of many years. This enables us to set up recharges promptly and accurately whilst avoiding the many pitfalls.
Reliable Data
The growing need for sustainability is placing ever greater demands on ESG managers for clean, high quality energy data.
We actively manage our recharge service and are constantly checking your data so that issues are avoided or resolved promply - not just during service charge reviews or at sustainablity reporting deadlines.
The benefits of Insight
Bespoke
For every property we provide a personalised recharge service to fit the property you have without the need for expensive and disruptive meter replacements. We take the time to properly understand your building and metering during the set-up phase, but also how you operate as a business to make sure our recharges fit you and your team.
Easy to Use
No fiddly web-portals or software to administer and train. Drop us an email or give us a quick call and we will take care of it, promptly and professionally, use our service just as if we were an in-house team.
Data Insight
Our system is specifically designed to meet the ever-growing data and analysis needs of landlords and tenants. As standard, our recharges include a high level of data and analysis for both landlord and your tenants, and if any other questions or requests arise then you can send these to our utility experts for a prompt and informed response.
Professional
Having a professional and knowledgable team working on your recharges gives your tenants confidence and adds to the value proposition of a landlord service. Our recharge service is prompt, accurate and delivered by passionate experts, not call centres. We have an in-depth knowledge of current regulations and requirements and keep close track of any new developments.
Billing in Advance
Help ease tight service charge cash flows via our ‘billing in advance’ service, by receiving tenant funds in advance of supplier invoices so that you can meet supplier payment terms and avoid late payment charges and disconnection threats.
Problem Solving
We carefully review and analyse data to identify suspected issues and bring them to your attention, and we can look into any issues that you’ve already identified. These may include:
Meter installation & configuration problems
Main supplier billing problems
Meter mix ups
Meter reading/human error
We have seen hundreds of errors over the years and can advise how best to quickly resolve and restore accurate recharging. We can liaise directly with your M&E and metering partners to help troubleshoot and cut through the jargon.