Where it leaks
Lifts and collections that were never billed
A bin gets emptied or an extra collection is made but the charge never reaches an invoice, so the work is delivered for free.
Tonnage invoiced below the weighbridge
The invoiced value sits below the weight or run-rate the finance data implies, so heavier loads are quietly under-recovered.
Failed Direct Debits on regular rounds
Recurring collection charges collected by Direct Debit fail and are never re-presented, so the payment simply never arrives.
A recurring charge that quietly stopped
A customer's regular collection charge disappears from the ledger while the service carries on, month after month.
The same load invoiced twice
High-volume billing can push the same lift or container onto two invoices, and untangling the dispute often costs more than it recovers.
Credit notes that never balance
A credit raised for a missed collection is duplicated or never matched back to the right invoice, leaving the account understated.
The scale
Revenue leakage is commonly estimated at around 1% to 3% of turnover, which on a waste and recycling business turning over £30m is roughly £300k to £900k a year (illustrative only). Direct Debit adds to the drain: GoCardless has observed that around 2.9% of Direct Debit payments fail, across about 55,000 businesses.
How it is found
The check is read-only: LeakIQ reads your own invoices, payments and bank data, changes nothing in your systems, and usually surfaces these patterns within days.
How to find it
How to spot a frozen contract rate
The ledger cannot tell you an uplift was owed, but it can prove the price never moved, which is where you start.
- 1Export your sales invoices for the last 18 to 24 months with customer, site, date, document number and amount, using a read-only export that changes nothing.
- 2Group by customer and sort by date, then read the amount column straight down each recurring account's billing cycles.
- 3Flag any account billed the same amount across a price anniversary, where an RPI, CPI or fixed-percentage clause should have raised the rate.
- 4Pull the contract and confirm the uplift clause and its anniversary date before concluding anything: the ledger shows the price did not move, not that an uplift was due.
- 5Bear in mind the gap compounds, so a rate missed last year and again this year is now billing well below the agreed price on every collection.
Rolling multi-site balances into one exposure figure
The account worth chasing first is rarely the single biggest invoice on the aged-debt report.
- 1Pull every open invoice with its customer, site and amount.
- 2Roll every open invoice up to the customer, not the individual site, into one combined balance.
- 3Sort the list by that combined total, largest first.
- 4Chase the account whose accumulated balance is largest, so a customer carrying a dozen smaller unpaid collections rises above the noise instead of being lost in it.
Checking duplicates and parked credits
Two ordinary billing artefacts, spotted with a sort and a cross-check.
- 1Sort by customer, amount and document number to surface the same service line invoiced twice.
- 2Confirm whether a rate update or a rerun billing run created a genuine duplicate, rather than two legitimate collections that happen to share a value.
- 3List your credit notes and unallocated credits.
- 4For each customer holding a credit, check whether they also have invoices ageing past due, since a credit sitting unused while invoices are chased is cash you already owe back working against you on the same account.
Take the full guide with you
If you would rather see your own figure than an estimate, we can produce a free, read-only leakage number from your finance data whenever you are ready.
Common questions
Does this work with per-lift and per-tonne billing?
Yes. LeakIQ reads the invoice, payment and ledger data behind high-volume, weight-based billing, so it can flag lifts and tonnage that were delivered but under-billed or never invoiced. It does this from your finance systems, without needing your operational routing or weighbridge software.
How is this different from what our credit control team already does?
Credit control chases invoices that already exist. Leakage detection finds money that never reached an invoice in the first place, or that failed after collection, such as under-billed lifts, stopped recurring charges and failed Direct Debits.
Is it safe to connect our finance systems?
Yes. The connection is read-only, so nothing in Xero, QuickBooks, Stripe, GoCardless or your ledger is changed and no charges are raised. It reads only the data needed to spot leakage.
Can the tool tell me an uplift was actually missed, and how is the amount worked out?
No. It proves only that the invoiced price did not move across the contract anniversary; it cannot see your contract, so it cannot confirm an uplift was owed. It sizes the figure from the observed annual value at an assumed uplift rate and labels it as an estimate, to help you prioritise which contracts to review first. Treat it as a shortlist and a rough scale, then confirm the real number against the indexation clause.
A collection round quietly stopped being invoiced. Will a failed-payment check catch it?
No, because nothing errors and no payment fails, so a failed-payment filter never shows it. You catch it from the billing cadence instead: list each recurring account against its expected monthly or quarterly rhythm and find the ones that produced no invoice this cycle. That missing cycle is the signal a round has dropped off the schedule, and it needs a person to confirm before putting it back on.
Keep reading
- How LeakIQ works for Waste and recycling
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.