The hospitality sector is facing uncertain times. Industry body UKHospitality is calling for urgent measures to avoid “sky-rocketing business rates” from next spring.
Nick Gauntlett, Head of Sales at Sustainable Energy First
At the moment, eligible businesses in the hospitality and leisure sector benefit from 75% off their business rates bills (up to a cap of £110,000 relief per business). But this ends on 31 March 2025 and could send shockwaves through the sector if no alternative help is put in place.
UKHospitality explain that a business with a rateable value of £80,000 would see its final business rates bill quadruple from £11,000 to £44,000 a year. We do not yet know if the autumn budget will contain any measures to reduce the impact. Meanwhile, many businesses have energy contracts due for renewal in October, adding to the financial pressure and uncertainty. The first half of 2024 has already seen a wave of pub closures as the industry struggles with these challenges.
A forgotten income stream
However, many hospitality businesses have a potential source of funds that could cushion the blow of rising costs. What many don’t realise is how common it is to be inaccurately billed by your utility providers – one study found that one in five bills have errors on them, and most businesses don’t pick these up. But if you have been charged in error, you can often get that money back.
We recovered £100,000 in wrongly paid utility costs for a single site hotel.
Sustainable Energy First works with businesses of all sizes to recover money they should never have paid in the first place. Most businesses don’t regularly audit their utility bills or get expert help with them. So, the wrongly paid costs mount up and when we get involved, it could easily be thousands. It’s effectively a whole new income stream for the business and yet it’s one that they often forget is possible. We recently helped a hotel to get £100,000 of its own money back.
Costly complexity
How can utility billing be so wrong, so often? A deregulated market with lots of different actors and stakeholders tends to be complex. This means many different elements go to make up a final bill, not all of which are even visible to the billpayer. Alongside the unit cost of the energy you actually consume, you are also paying for the maintenance of energy networks, the cost of energy wasted along the way, the environmental impact of your consumption and so on. These so-called non-commodity costs make up a significant portion of your billing total, but they won’t necessarily mean anything to a non-expert.
There are many other issues too, such as straightforward error either on your part or theirs, or technical problems such as a malfunctioning meter.
An expert eye
The Sustainable Energy First team offer a revenue recovery solution with no obligations and no upfront fee. We cast an expert eye over your utility bills for the past few years, looking for suspicious patterns and charges that shouldn’t be there. For example, we might be able to tell from the trend in your water billing that you are being charged for a leak that isn’t your fault.
Flipping heck! We recovered the equivalent of 9,100 burgers (£67,000) for one fast-food restaurant.
We only charge a finder’s service fee, which means that if we don’t find anything wrong with your billing then our service is free. When we do find a problem, our service tends to pay for itself many times over in money recovered.
Once we’ve discovered a billing error, we don’t just report to you. We do the work of contacting those suppliers to get the money back to you. We have decades of experience in dealing with them and we know how to make things move efficiently.
As well as recovering money lost in the past, we can help to set things up for the future so that it becomes much less likely to happen again. This means working with you to update your systems in terms of metering, billing, supplier contracts and so on.
Time to get your money back
Unless your business is already in the habit of regularly auditing bills with experts, there is a strong chance that some mischarging has happened in the past and that you could stand to profit from revenue recovery. That money could help the business grow, or provide a financial cushion during tough periods.
Since Sustainable Energy First operate on a “no find, no fee” basis, you have nothing to lose from getting us involved. For a no-obligation chat, fill in the form below to get in touch.
