Month end in the accounts office
It is the last working day of the month and your accounts assistant is preparing the invoice run. The billing system produces invoices from each customer's schedule: two lifts a week of a 1100 litre general waste bin, one lift a fortnight of dry mixed recycling. It assumes those lifts happened, because that is what the contract says.
Meanwhile the vehicles have been recording something else. Extra lifts phoned in by customers, lifts skipped because the bin was not presented, a pub that closed for refurbishment for three weeks, a container that was swapped for a bigger one halfway through the month. Some of that reached the office on paper. Some of it is in the in-cab system. Some of it is in a driver's head.
The invoices go out regardless. A week later the queries start arriving, and each one takes the assistant half a morning of digging.
Two systems telling different stories
The mismatch is structural. Your billing is contract led and your operations are event led, and in most waste firms those live in different places: an accounts or billing package that knows about contracts and prices, and a round or in-cab system that knows about lifts.
- Extra lifts are logged by the driver but never raised as a chargeable job, so they are lost revenue.
- Scheduled lifts that did not happen are still invoiced, which turns into credit notes and irritated customers.
- Container changes mid-month leave the old bin size on the invoice.
- Suspended accounts, such as a shop closed for refit, keep billing because the suspension was agreed on the phone.
- Price increases apply to the contract but not to ad hoc lifts charged at an old rate.
Each gap is small. Together they mean the invoice run is a guess, corrected by customers who spot overcharges and silent about the undercharges nobody spots.
Where the money leaks
Undercharging is the leak you do not see. An extra lift that never reaches an invoice is income that simply vanishes, and nobody complains about not being billed. Overcharging is the one you do see, and it costs twice: the credit note, and the time spent handling the query and the damage to the relationship.
There is a third cost in the office. Reconciling lifts to invoices by hand, when it happens at all, is spreadsheet work that falls on one person at the busiest point of the month, and it tends to stop whenever that person is off.
How we match lifts to the invoice run
What we build sits between your lift data and your billing, and runs before the invoices are raised rather than after the complaints come in.
- We pull lift records from your in-cab system or driver app each day, including extra lifts and not-presented exceptions.
- Each lift is matched to an account and a container, using the container number, address and round, with fuzzy matching for the addresses that were typed differently in each system.
- Before the invoice run, we compare the contract schedule with the actual lifts for every account and flag the differences by type.
- Chargeable extra lifts become draft invoice lines at the rate in the contract, or the current ad hoc rate if there is none.
- Scheduled lifts that did not happen are checked against the exception reason, so a not-presented lift can be billed if your terms say so and a missed-by-us lift is not.
- A short review queue shows the differences that need a person, such as a lift on an account that is marked closed, and the approved lines are pushed to your billing system or accounts package, for example Xero or Sage, through its API or an import file.
| Difference found | What the system does |
|---|---|
| Extra lift recorded, not on schedule | Draft chargeable line for approval |
| Scheduled lift, not presented | Apply your billing rule for not presented |
| Scheduled lift, missed by us | Remove from invoice, note on account |
| Lift on a closed or suspended account | Hold for a person to check |
| Container size changed mid-month | Split the period at the change date |
The invoice run after the change
On the last working day your accounts assistant opens the review queue instead of a blank spreadsheet. Most accounts matched and need nothing. There are extra lifts from the week the builders' merchant had a clear-out, ready to approve at the contract rate. There is a restaurant that had no lifts for a fortnight, and the note shows it was suspended for refurbishment, so the lifts come off. There is one lift against an account marked cancelled, which turns out to be a bin that was never recovered.
She deals with those, approves the run, and the invoices go out reflecting what the trucks actually did. The queries that arrive the following week are about genuine disagreements, and each one opens with the lift history already on screen.
Does this sound like your month end?
- Invoices are generated from contract schedules with no check against lifts.
- Extra lifts are charged only when a driver remembers to hand in a note.
- Credit notes for lifts that did not happen are a regular monthly job.
- Nobody can say how many chargeable lifts went unbilled last quarter.
- Container changes and suspensions are agreed by phone and reach billing late, if at all.