Not every win is a check, and I think we undersell this.
I audited a pair of accounts at one address recently. Forty-eight statements, complete set, and the reconciliation came back perfectly clean. Every component summed to the printed total. Every rated line recomputed against the printed determinants. No estimated reads, no gaps in the billing periods, no double-billed days. The utility had billed it accurately for two straight years.
A lot of auditors would call that a dead file and move on. What was actually sitting in it:
One meter was paying about twenty-two percent more per kilowatt-hour than the other, on an identical rate schedule with identical supply. The cause was a load shape problem — near-constant peak, low load factor — that no amount of billing review would have surfaced, because there was no billing error to find.
A tax exemption that had never been claimed, on the meter that qualified for it.
Third-party supply at forty-four percent of total spend, on a contract nobody had looked at since it was signed.
Zero refund from the utility. Substantial value to the client, all of it prospective. The report said so plainly on the first page, and the client valued that more than a stretched claim would have been worth.
I audited a pair of accounts at one address recently. Forty-eight statements, complete set, and the reconciliation came back perfectly clean. Every component summed to the printed total. Every rated line recomputed against the printed determinants. No estimated reads, no gaps in the billing periods, no double-billed days. The utility had billed it accurately for two straight years.
A lot of auditors would call that a dead file and move on. What was actually sitting in it:
One meter was paying about twenty-two percent more per kilowatt-hour than the other, on an identical rate schedule with identical supply. The cause was a load shape problem — near-constant peak, low load factor — that no amount of billing review would have surfaced, because there was no billing error to find.
A tax exemption that had never been claimed, on the meter that qualified for it.
Third-party supply at forty-four percent of total spend, on a contract nobody had looked at since it was signed.
Zero refund from the utility. Substantial value to the client, all of it prospective. The report said so plainly on the first page, and the client valued that more than a stretched claim would have been worth.