Bye Bye Back Billing?

With calls from the Citizens Advice Bureau to “radically reduce” the length of time suppliers can “back bill”, or to scrap the concept all together, we look at what impact that could have on suppliers across the market.

Research suggests that up to 2.1m households have been impacted by large and late bills. The average bill for these households was £206, with 15% above the £250 mark. Even taking the average, a removal of the back billing policy against delayed billing of this scale would see suppliers saddled with a staggering £433m revenue gap.

Understandably, most suppliers will be opposed to such a sweeping change and there will be complexity within these numbers around customer engagement and data integrity. But this value should and will quickly become a tangible driver in ensuring accurately and timely billing of customers.

The choice faced by suppliers now is to invest in the robustness, accuracy and completeness of their billing systems and processes or to explain and absorb a significant write off impact if the safety net of back billing is taken away.