We help you increase your utility’s revenues
SETTING RATES TO GENERATE REVENUES FOR OPERATIONS AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Ensuring that your water and wastewater utility is financially healthy today and into the future. We will help you assess whether you are recovering enough funds to keep the utility running over time and will help you design and price rates that will generate an appropriate level of revenue and meet your objectives like affordability, conservation, or stable month-to-month revenue. Our rate analyses are most appropriate for small and medium-sized utilities that do not want to pay for full cost-of-service studies. This service ensures that you have the money you need to sustain your utility and serve your community today and for years to come.
INCREASING YOUR ON-TIME BILL PAYMENTS
Ensuring that you maximize the number customers in your water utility paying their bills. Customers fail to pay bills on time for four main reasons: ongoing affordability challenges, short-term affordability issues, forgetting to pay, or having the money to pay but choosing not to. Our innovative, data-driven approach analyzes your customer’s bill payment patterns to determine which non-payment reasons are most prevalent at your utility. We will then help you craft programs and approaches that will encourage more customers to pay their bills on time and in full. This service ensures that you have reliable cash flow and that staff resources don’t have to be wasted chasing down high volumes of late payments.
EXPANDING AFFORDABLE ACCESS TO WATER & WASTEWATER SERVICE
Ensuring that a maximum number of your customers can access water and wastewater service regardless of household income. We will help you analyze the demographics of your community, looking at population trends, earnings, employment, household expenses, and participation in social safety net programs to identify potential affordability challenges and potential issues of rate increases. We will then evaluate your rate structure and customer usage patterns to improve affordability. We will also help you design and implement appropriate and legal customer assistance programs to help less fortunate families, from cash assistance to lowering household water consumption. This service ensures that all customers enjoy the health benefits and convenience of regular water and wastewater service.
IMPROVING YOUR ACCESS TO INFRASTRUCTURE FUNDING PROGRAMS
Ensuring that your water system has access to the most appropriate loan and grant programs for your infrastructure needs such as the State Revolving Fund and USDA. We will help you identify the best funding program for your asset replacement, system expansion, or lead service line replacement program. We also coach you through the process of preparing funding program applications to ensure success. We have strong relationships with infrastructure funding programs and track new programs and emerging opportunities for utilities. This service ensures that you can replace critical infrastructure at the lowest possible cost.
CRAFTING BETTER COLLECTIONS POLICIES
Ensuring that your collections policies are fair and appropriate for your community. We will thoroughly review your current collections strategy to identify areas of improvement and to streamline workflows. We will then research and report how peer utilities manage customer collections. We will then work with you to rewrite your collections policies as needed, focusing on payment options, payment timelines, shutoff policies, penalties, and recollection policies. We can also evaluate your third-party debt collectors, assessing their effectiveness, adherence to utility policies, and alignment with customer service standards. This service ensures that you reduce bad debt, enhance cash flow, and maintain a professional, customer-centric approach to debt recovery.
MINIMIZING WATER WASTE AND IMPROVING WATER METERING & BILLING ACCURACY
Ensuring that your revenues are maximized and unnecessary expenses are minimized. We will help you conduct a water audit for your community to identify the volume of water that you produce but customers do not pay for, including water that leaks from the distribution system and water that reaches customers but isn’t metered or billed accurately. We will help you craft programs and policies to minimize water loss and increase revenues. And we will help you translate the complicated water audit into language that will inspire your board to move forward with necessary capital projects such as meter replacements and line repairs. This service ensures that your customers pay you for the maximum volume of water that you produce as is practical.