Every broker checks bills to some degree. The question is whether your process catches everything, or just the obvious stuff.
How manual checking works
Someone on your team opens a bill, opens the contract, and compares the numbers. Unit rate, standing charge, consumption, VAT. They might use a spreadsheet to track what they've checked.
What it catches: Obvious errors. A unit rate that's wildly different from the contract. A bill that's double the usual amount.
What it misses: Subtle errors. A rate that's 0.5p/kWh too high. VAT at 20% instead of 5% on a qualifying business. A standing charge that crept up by 2p/day. An estimated read that's been running for six months.
What it costs: Time. At 15-30 minutes per bill, a broker managing 200 customers is spending 500+ hours per year on validation. That's either a dedicated hire or hours pulled from relationship management.
How automated validation works
Bills flow into the system — by upload, API, or CRM integration. The software extracts every data point, compares each charge against the contract on file and market benchmarks, and rates the bill green, amber, or red.
What it catches: Everything the manual process catches, plus the subtle errors. Rate mismatches down to 0.1p. VAT eligibility. CCL exemptions. Consumption anomalies. Overlapping billing periods. Duplicate bills.
What it misses: Errors that require human judgement — unusual contract structures, bespoke pass-through arrangements, or disputes that need context beyond what's on the invoice.
What it costs: A software subscription. Your team's time shifts from checking every bill to reviewing only the flagged ones.
The real comparison
It's not about automated being perfect and manual being bad. It's about scale.
A good auditor checking bills manually will catch most errors. But they can't check every bill on every customer every quarter. They prioritise, they skip the ones that look fine, and some errors get through.
Automated validation checks every bill. The auditor's job shifts from finding errors to confirming them. That's a better use of their expertise.
What this looks like in practice
With Edge, the workflow is:
- Bill arrives and gets validated automatically
- Clean bills pass through with a green tick — no human review needed
- Flagged bills go to the auditor with the error highlighted, the evidence shown, and a supplier query drafted
- The auditor confirms, amends, or dismisses the flag
- Settled disputes turn green in your CRM
Your auditor still does the important work. They just don't waste time on the 80% of bills that are correct.
Making the switch
If you're currently checking bills manually, automated validation doesn't replace your process — it upgrades it. Your team stays in the loop for the decisions that matter. The software handles the repetitive checking.
Try Edge free and run your first 10 bills through. Compare what it catches against what your manual process found.