Where it leaks
Failed Direct Debits on subscriptions
A customer's monthly Direct Debit fails while the service keeps running, so the charge sits uncollected until someone notices and chases it.
Provisioned but never billed
A line or upgrade goes live in the network but never reaches the recurring invoice, and metered usage above the bundle is billed below what was actually consumed.
Subscriptions that quietly stopped billing
After a plan change or migration a recurring charge simply ceases while the service stays live, leaving months of unbilled monthly revenue.
Duplicate charges across billing runs
The same subscription or bundle is invoiced twice when billing cycles overlap or accounts are migrated, creating refunds you will later have to give back.
Wholesale and carrier recharges not recovered
Carrier and wholesale costs that should be passed on to the customer are missed or invoiced short, so you carry the cost without the matching revenue.
Rounding and FX on international traffic
Per-unit rounding across millions of usage records and FX on international or roaming settlement shave small amounts off a very large number of invoices.
The scale
Across industries it is commonly estimated that 1% to 3% of revenue leaks before it reaches the bank, and GoCardless has observed that roughly 2.9% of Direct Debit payments fail across about 55,000 businesses. As an illustration only, on a connectivity business turning over £20m a year, 1% to 3% is roughly £200k to £600k.
How it is found
LeakIQ reads your own billing, payment and ledger data read-only, with no change to any system, and needs no rollout before the leaks surface.
Take the full guide with you
If you would like your own figure, we can show you for free what your finance data reveals, with no obligation.
Common questions
How is this different from the billing checks we already run?
Most billing checks confirm that invoices were raised correctly, but they rarely catch a subscription that silently stopped billing or a provisioned line that never reached an invoice at all. LeakIQ reads the finance data itself and flags where earned money never arrives, independent of the billing system that created it.
Will this work with usage-based and wholesale billing?
Yes. It reads invoices, payments and ledger entries from systems like Xero, QuickBooks, Stripe and GoCardless, so recurring subscriptions and carrier recharges are in scope as billed amounts. It compares each customer's billing against its own history rather than against your rating platform, so usage under-billing, where the volume was metered but never made it onto an invoice, is outside what it can see today.
Is it safe to connect our finance systems?
The connection is read-only, so nothing in your billing or ledger is changed. LeakIQ only reads the records it needs to spot leakage and reports back what it finds.
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 Telecoms and connectivity
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.
