Inspire Leisure recovered £110,000 through a business water audit

Client overview

Inspire Leisure runs multiple leisure sites with exactly the kind of usage that makes water billing complicated. Pools, showers, irrigation, plant. Across four sites, the team suspected the historic billing wasn’t fully accurate, but didn’t have the bandwidth or the specialist eye to evidence it themselves.

The brief wasn’t to change supplier. The sites were inside existing 3 year contracts. It was to find out whether they’d been overpaying, and if so, to actually get the money back.

The challenge

Complex usage that doesn’t match billing assumptions. Leisure operations use water in ways that standard retail assumptions don’t price well. Pool top ups, backwashing, irrigation and washdown all move consumption around in patterns a desk based billing system never sees.

Multiple sites, multiple billing structures. Each of the four sites had its own supplies and its own history. A discrepancy that looks small on one bill only becomes visible as a pattern when the sites are compared properly.

Mid contract, so no switching leverage. With 3 year contracts in place, the usual procurement route was closed. Whatever was recovered had to come from the existing suppliers.

How we approached it

An audit is a different exercise from a procurement. The question isn’t who should bill you, it’s whether what you’ve already been billed was correct. That question can be asked mid contract, and the answer can be worth more than a switch.

The audit ran on a no find no fee basis. If the billing had been accurate, Inspire would have gained the evidence that it was accurate.

What we did, step by step

Pulled the historic invoice trail across all four sites. A full multi year invoice review for each supply, lined up so anomalies between sites and across periods became visible. Discrepancies that look small on a single bill stand out clearly when laid alongside the rest.

Visited each site to verify actual usage. Pools, irrigation, washdown. We confirmed what was actually happening on site against what was being billed, because leisure usage rarely matches the assumptions retailers price against.

Pursued the suppliers through to refund. Once the overcharges were documented, we worked through to refunds and ongoing rate corrections rather than leaving the discrepancies on file.

What changed

£110,000 returned to Inspire Leisure. Retrospective billing corrections on the audited supplies recovered £110,000. No supplier switch and no contract change was required.

Ongoing cost reductions on the audited sites. Where rates were wrong they were corrected going forward as well as backwards, so the savings continue across the remaining contract term.

Clarity on what each site actually pays for. Inspire now has documented evidence of what each site’s water bill should be, line by line. Future bills are easy to check against that baseline.

Key insight

The more complex the usage, the more likely the billing is wrong. Leisure sites find more overcharges than most sectors because pools, showers, irrigation and plant create patterns that standard billing assumptions don’t handle. Metered supplies can also be miscoded or misread, especially across several sites with different setups.

The refund is the headline, but the baseline matters just as much. Once you know what each bill should say, checking future bills stops being guesswork.

Does this look like your organisation?

If you run a leisure trust, holiday park, academy or any multi site operation with complex water usage, the same audit applies. There’s no fixed size threshold. The relevant question is whether your historic invoice volume is large enough that even a small percentage of error becomes a meaningful refund. For multi site leisure operations, it almost always is.

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