Old tenants move out without providing meter readings and forwarding new addresses to the water and energy companies. After new tenants move in contacting the water and energy companies is often not a priority. The consequences for the utility companies are typically a heavily manual, time consuming and expensive process of tracking and tracing the old tenant and identifying the new tenant. During this time debt will increase and collections activities will exert greater pressure on margins. 
 
The increased cost to serve associated with converting occupier accounts into “good” paying customer accounts is estimated to be 21% of the cost stack for utility companies. This cost is made up of the cost of staff, increased customer comms contact and inflated agency costs. Cashflow is also impacted owing to the delay or failure to book revenues.
 
Additionally, in the water sector the failure to meet the target for the reduction of void accounts, which is an AMP7 ODI, may result in under performance penalty. 
 
Existing manual processes may lead to a lack of clear information supporting the scale of the issue:
- How long has an account remained in occupier status? 
- Has it been billed? 
- What is the risk of another COT (Change of Tenant) at the supply address and losing revenue altogether? 
- Has a fraudulent COT occurred?
 
Dynamatix with their intelligent platform called Catura™ worked together with utility sector experts to design a fully automated void management process called VoID2: