Our Client

Community Utilities, an Amber company, provides landlord billing services for the build-to-rent market, serving over 15,000 apartments across the UK. The company’s Resident Billing proposition simplifies billing and payments for both landlords and residents by presenting multiple utilities on a single monthly bill, such as electricity, gas, water, heating, and cooling. Energy usage data is collected from sub-meters installed for each residential unit, while landlords benefit from having a single supplier contract. As well as billing, Community Utilities provides end-to-end customer service for occupants and effective debt management.

Resident Billing from Community Utilities is powered by SkyBill Utility Management, Billing and CIS, a powerful meter-to-cash solution built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and deployed in the Cloud.

Challenges

Legacy processes were hampering billing performance

Community Utilities recognised that its legacy processes were holding back its billing performance, resulting in unwanted outcomes, such as billing backlogs and late payments from residents. Because the company’s billing operations were not well aligned with the SkyBill system, it was hard for Community Utilities to reap the full benefits of SkyBill’s rich functionality.

Goals

Scalable business growth powered by automated billing

Community Utilities wanted the ability to scale its business efficiently, without unduly increasing the complexity or costs of its billing operations. Making the most of the SkyBill system was identified as an important enabler in this regard. A key objective was to move away from manual processing and leverage untapped functionality within SkyBill that would help increase the automation of the company’s billing functions.

Solution

Community Utilities decided to extend its existing deployment of SkyBill Utility Management, Billing and CIS, in conjunction with harmonising the company’s billing processes with how the SkyBill system works. This freed up the business to take advantage of previously unused features within SkyBill, with a particular focus on increasing the automation of Community Utility’s billing processes.

Eliminating manual validation of meter reads

Community Utility used to manually validate a high proportion of meter reads from the properties it manages, which was laborious and time-consuming. The meter data is now automatically checked and uploaded directly into SkyBill from the company’s data lake, without requiring any manual intervention. A further enhancement will be to activate SkyBill’s built-in meter data validation functionality, to provide a secondary check of the data ahead of running the billing.

Automated overnight billing

A key objective for the company is moving towards automated overnight billing. Previously, Community Utilities manually uploaded sites into SkyBill during working hours to initiate the billing cycle. In future, SkyBill will automatically generate the bills overnight for any sites that need billing, freeing up the in-house billing team to focus on addressing any exceptions that have arisen when they come into work. This will make the whole billing process much quicker and slicker.

Paul Stretton, Executive Director, Community Utilities “SkyBill has become an integral part of how we grow, because we can increase our size without complexity or cost.”

Outcomes

Unified billing for any combination of utilities

Using SkyBill, Community Utilities can flexibly address landlords’ requirements for all-encompassing bills that include not just electricity and gas but other utilities too, such as water, heating and cooling. The capability within SkyBill to bill for multiple types of utilities while presenting residents or businesses with a unified bill means Community Utilities can cater for a wide range of residential and commercial property management scenarios.

Consistent billing excellence

By reconfiguring the company’s internal processes to make the most of SkyBill, Community Utilities is now enjoying consistently high levels of billing performance, as well as comfortably exceeding the service levels agreed with its clients for producing on-time bills. In addition to reducing inbound customer service calls, these excellent performance levels are also helping the company win new business.

Automated billing underpins scalable business growth

Automating many of the company’s previously manual billing processes has proved transformational for Community Utilities. The business plans to unlock additional SkyBill functionality in the future to automate its billing processes even further. Embracing billing automation is helping Community Utilities to achieve its goal of growing the business in a cost-effective and scalable manner.

Partnered for success

Community Utilities has found in SkyBill a billing partner that it trusts to support its current business strategy and future growth objectives. The SkyBill team works in close partnership with Community Utilities to understand its requirements in depth and advise how to get the most out of the SkyBill system to support the company’s business objectives.

About SkyBill

SkyBill is enterprise billing software suitable for any utility company, including electricity, gas, water/wastewater, and heating, as well as for property managers, landlords and other service providers of any size. Based on Microsoft technologies, the solution comprises Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Dynamics NAV) ERP, a Utility billing add-on, and a client self-service web portal. SkyBill is a high-value, yet affordable, web-based utility billing solution available in the Cloud as SAAS (software as a service), or alternatively as an on-premise solution.