TEAM looks at Government plans for the water industry in England and explains why electronic billing to the UK Utility Billing Standard is the way forward.
In just over a years’ time the Government will introduce new regulations to the water market in England.
Under the proposals, which have been published for pre-legislative scrutiny, all businesses and public sector bodies in England will be able to switch their water and sewerage suppliers, allowing them to obtain more competitive prices, improve their efficiency and tender for services better suited to meet their individual needs.
The changes, which are set to be introduced in April 2017, will kick off a nationwide competitive market and water companies who are able to bill in the recognised industry standards EDI format will have a competitive advantage.
Business customers will request that water companies provide ebilling to the UK industry standard, TRADACOMS 26 version 3 protocol. Many multi-site customers already receive electronic bills from their electricity and gas suppliers and are benefiting from dramatic time and cost savings over processing invoice data manually.
As a supplier you could increase your chances of winning new customers if you are able to provide good quality industry standard EDI billing.
The ability of a supplier to provide electronic billing or EDI is often the second largest factor (after price) when multi-site organisations select a new supplier, and can be a major customer retention tool. TEAM can offer all the support required to provide exact, secure and timely EDI invoices.
Pete Morrell, Sales Manager at TEAM said:
“TEAM e-billing Software Manager is an easy to implement system that generates EDI customer bills from your existing billing system without interfering with its operation. It can generate files for electricity, gas and water bills in any desired format, including the current UK industry standard as well as xml.”
Find out more about TEAM e-billing software click here.