{"id":144055,"date":"2022-12-01T09:27:28","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T09:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sap.com\/africa\/?p=144055"},"modified":"2023-09-27T18:55:26","modified_gmt":"2023-09-27T18:55:26","slug":"revenue-assurance-gives-utilities-fair-footing-for-growth-just-transition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.sap.com\/africa\/2022\/12\/revenue-assurance-gives-utilities-fair-footing-for-growth-just-transition\/","title":{"rendered":"Revenue Assurance Gives Utilities Fair Footing for Growth, Just Transition"},"content":{"rendered":"
No company can survive a consistent loss in revenue. When companies fail to collect the revenue owed for services rendered, it puts pressure on their cash flow that could leave them unable to cover their operational costs, struggle to grow, and even enter into decline.<\/p>\n
This is proving abundantly clear in the African utilities sector, where non-payment, consumption-based fraud, illegal connections and other factors are costing billions in lost revenue.<\/p>\n
Power utility Eskom recently revealed that more than half of the electricity purchased by South African municipalities is lost to illegal connections and non-payment<\/a>. This has led to a R51-billion debt by municipalities, adding to Eskom’s significant R400-billion debt burden and hampering the utility’s plans to build additional capacity or its transition to renewable energy.<\/p>\n In East Africa, Kenya Power has investigated cases of fraud in its post-paid billing system, citing billions in lost revenue<\/a>.<\/p>\n This issue is prevalent in the utilities sector of other regions too. A 2017 study estimated that electricity theft and non-technical losses cost the global utilities sector $96-billion per year<\/a>. This places enormous pressure on utilities and hampers efforts to improve service delivery to customers, adopt new, more sustainable forms of energy, and scale into new markets.<\/p>\n In the utilities sector, several factors contribute to lost revenue, including faulty metering, inaccurate billing, ineffective revenue collection, consumption-based fraud, leaks, and issues with incorrect customer accounts and contracts.<\/p>\n As the sector shifts to meet the utility needs of a growing population – Africa’s population is expected to nearly double to almost 2.5 billion people by 2050<\/a> – and pressure grows to move to more sustainable, less carbon-intensive forms of energy, maintaining high levels of revenue collection will be critical.<\/p>\n A vital component of optimal revenue collection is the practice of revenue assurance.<\/p>\n Revenue assurance is a way of increasing an organisation’s income by identifying areas where revenue is lost, and minimising such losses by fixing the cause of lost revenue.<\/p>\nRevenue assurance mitigates fraud, reduces losses<\/strong><\/h2>\n