UTILITY INVOICE VALIDATION UK | UTILITY INVOICING UK | ENERGY BILL VALIDATION UK

Invoice validation is the process of reviewing and verifying invoices to ensure that they are accurate, legitimate, and compliant with the agreed contract before they are approved for payment. This process is essential for maintaining financial accuracy, preventing errors or fraudulent activities, and ensuring that a company only pays for utilities services that have been properly received and agreed upon.

Here’s an overview of the steps typically involved in invoice validation:

Receipt and Review

The first step is to receive the invoice from the vendor or supplier. The invoice is then thoroughly reviewed to ensure that it contains all the necessary information, including item descriptions, quantities (generally consumption), prices, and any applicable taxes or discounts.

Matching with Contracts and Pricing Verification

The invoice is matched against the corresponding contracts, or agreements to verify that the utility services have been invoiced as per the contract and the consumption volume or quantity is correct. Any discrepancies are investigated and resolved. 

Compliance Check

The invoice is checked for compliance with regulatory requirements, tax laws, and company policies. Any discrepancies or non-compliance issues are addressed before approval.

Duplicate Check: Invoices are screened to prevent duplicate payments. This involves comparing the current invoice to previous payments to ensure that the same invoice hasn’t been processed before.

Payment Approval

Once the invoice has successfully passed all validation checks and approvals, it is marked as valid and approved for payment. This is then sent across the the organisation's Finance Department in a batch for payment. This can either be weekly batches or monthly depending on their requirements.

To ensure an invoice is valid, we compare the invoice to a number of sources of information. We build the invoice up from first principles to compare it against that billed by a supplier.

The sources we compare invoices to can include, but are not limited to:

•  Energy supply contracts
•  Trading Logs – particularly for flexible supply contracts
•  Charging Statements, e.g. NorthernPowerGrid
•  Consumption data recordsRateable values (Water)