Where it leaks
Cover and ad-hoc hours delivered but never billed
Short-notice cover, sickness and holiday relief and extra patrols get worked, but the hours never reach the invoice, so the month goes out billed short against the cover actually delivered.
Rate uplifts that never reached the invoice
When a National Living Wage rise or an annual contract uplift lands, the charge rate on the invoice can stay at the old figure, so every invoice after that date goes out at last year's price.
A per-site charge that quietly stopped
On re-mobilisation or a rota change a recurring monthly site charge can drop off the billing run while guarding carries on, showing up as a regular charge that simply ceased.
Failed Direct Debits and BACS collections left unchased
A client's Direct Debit or standing collection fails and nobody follows it up, so an invoice that was raised correctly is never actually collected.
Credit notes for SLA penalties left open or doubled
Credits raised for a missed patrol or service point can be applied twice or never reversed once the issue is resolved, quietly eroding the balance.
Short payments on disputed hours
A client trims a few contested hours and pays less than invoiced, and the small shortfall is written off in practice rather than chased.
The scale
Revenue leakage is commonly estimated at around 1% to 3% of turnover, and on a security firm turning over £20m that is roughly £200k to £600k a year, purely as an illustration. Direct Debit alone is not immune: GoCardless has observed that roughly 2.9% of Direct Debit payments fail, across about 55,000 businesses.
How it is found
LeakIQ reads your own invoicing, payment and ledger data read-only, with no change to how you bill, roster or collect, and with no implementation to sit through first.
Take the full guide with you
If you would like to see your own figure, we can produce a free read-only estimate of where revenue is leaking in your business, with no obligation.
Common questions
Does this work if our cover hours and rotas change constantly?
Partly, and the limit is worth naming up front. LeakIQ reads the invoices, payments and ledger entries you already produce and compares each customer's billing against its own history, so it catches a rate that never moved at renewal, a recurring charge that quietly stopped, a failed collection and an invoice that aged. What it cannot do is compare hours billed against hours actually worked, because that lives in your rostering system and never reaches the finance data. Where cover hours move constantly, the value is in the rate and collection patterns rather than hours versus billed.
We bill from a workforce system, not from finance. Can you still see the gaps?
Some of it, and the limit is worth naming. LeakIQ works read-only from your accounting and payment records, so it catches a rate that never moved at renewal, a recurring site charge that quietly stopped, a failed collection and an invoice that aged, even when your roster sits in a separate system. What it cannot do is check hours billed against hours worked, because those never reach the finance data.
How long does it take and does it disrupt billing?
It is read-only and needs no change to how you invoice, roster or collect, so nothing in your live billing moves. Because it is a read rather than an implementation, the time to first findings is really just the time it takes to get us the data.
How is this different from an aged debtors report or a Power BI or Tableau dashboard?
An aged debtors report, or a dashboard in Power BI or Tableau, shows what is already on your ledger: invoices you raised that have not been paid. Revenue leakage is the money that never reached the ledger correctly in the first place, under-billed, never invoiced, or failed on collection and never chased, so it usually never appears on a debtors report at all. That is what this audit looks for.
Keep reading
- How LeakIQ works for Manned security
See it applied to your systems, not just the theory.
- What revenue leakage is
The plain definition, and why earned revenue slips before the bank.
- Revenue leakage in every other sector
The same field guide for facilities, waste, logistics, security and more.
