A filed audit reports how much water a system lost. No filing reports where the water went. That shows up only where the billing records, the meter reads and the production records disagree with each other.
How the reconciliation works
We take read-only extracts of your billing history, your meter reads or AMI interval data, your production and district-level flow records, and your service inventory. Then we reconcile them against each other and against your own filed balance, and we work the disagreements.
Loss that is a billing problem, loss that is a metering problem and loss that is water physically leaving the system look different in that reconciliation, and what separates them is which records disagree with which. The deliverable names a cause as well as an amount.
What arrives
A ranked list. Each row is a specific account, address or zone, with a dollar figure, the cause, the record the finding rests on, and a confidence. Every row you can act on this quarter is separated from every row that belongs in a capital plan.
Plus the reconciliation itself, as a spreadsheet you keep, built so your staff can run it again next quarter without us.
| Account or zone | Cause | What it rests on | Annual $ | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Industrial park, 4 premises | Consumption with no active bill | Read history against the billing record | 84,200 | Measured |
| DMA 7, night flow | Real loss, one main | District night flow against its own distribution | 61,000 | Measured |
| 212 commercial premises | Rate class applied to the wrong customer | Class code against the premise inventory | 38,400 | Measured |
| 1,140 residential meters | Meter reads flatlined | A read series that stops moving | 22,900 | Measured |
| Unbilled authorized use | Not measured | Filed as a regulator default, not a reading | — | Not collectable |
The last row carries no dollar figure on purpose: it is a modeled component, and a contingency fee on a modeled number is a number nobody can collect.
Illustrative — names, dates and figures invented.
The rows above the line are accounts with a read history and a discriminating test behind them. The bottom row is an assumption the filing made, and no fee should be computed on it.
Where this stops
A modeled share of a water balance is not recoverable revenue and does not go on the list. A finding that does is measured: an account with a read history and a discriminating test behind it. Modeled components are reported separately and labeled, because a contingency fee on a modeled number is a number nobody can collect.
Sometimes the answer is a new system. More often the data needed to find the money is already in systems the utility pays for, and that is what we look at first.
Who this is for
Best fit: a retail water utility with billing data in an ERP or CIS, meter reads in an AMI or AMR headend, and someone in finance who has wondered why production and billing do not track. Roughly 3,000 connections and up, though the reconciliation works at any size. Below that the recoverable amount usually does not justify the engagement, and we will say so on the call.
Poor fit: if your meter reads are on paper cards, the first project is getting them into a system, and that is a different and larger conversation we are happy to have.
The fee
Flat, set before the work starts, and it covers the deliverables listed above. Three weeks from the extracts arriving.