Industries

Energy and utilities software development

Energy brokers and third party intermediaries (TPIs) run one of the more procedurally dense back offices in commercial services, and most of them run it on software that was never built for the shape of the work. A generic CRM organises a pipeline by deal stage — new lead, quoted, negotiating, won — when the thing that actually drives an energy broker's calendar is the Contract End Date (CED) sitting on each meter point, because that date, not any sales stage, determines when a customer becomes contactable, when a renewal quote is due, and when the account is exposed to an out-of-contract or deemed rate if nobody acts in time.

We build software for brokers, TPIs, energy consultancies and multi-site portfolio managers who buy and manage business gas and electricity contracts on behalf of end customers. The work sits around the data layer of UK energy supply — MPANs and MPRNs, half-hourly (HH) and non-half-hourly (NHH) settlement, supplier rate books, uplift and commission, and the compliance obligations that come with running outbound sales and call recording under Ofgem's expectations and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).

None of this is exotic once it is named correctly, and that is precisely the point: a generalist software agency without energy sector exposure will build a perfectly competent CRM that has no concept of a Contract End Date driving a renewal, no field for a 21-digit MPAN core and top line, and no model for the difference between a half-hourly settled site and a small non-half-hourly site on a given profile class. Those distinctions are not cosmetic. They determine what data a quote needs, how a tender is aggregated across a portfolio, and how a bill is checked for accuracy once the contract is live. The engineering effort we spend on any energy platform is therefore front-loaded into getting the data model right — the meter point hierarchy, the settlement classification, the rate structure — because every downstream feature, from renewal alerting to commission calculation, inherits errors made at that layer.

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Where it breaks

The problems described in the sector's own language

Pipeline is organised by deal stage instead of Contract End Date

A generic CRM tracks a lead through stages that suit new business. Renewal business — the majority of an established broker's book — is driven by CED, not by stage, and CED sits on individual meter points rather than on the account as a whole. Without a pipeline built around CED, renewal windows are tracked in spreadsheets that fall out of date the moment a supplier confirms a new rate, and a book of several hundred live contracts becomes impossible to prioritise by anything other than gut feel.

Multi-site customers are held as separate, disconnected records

A customer with fifteen sites often ends up as fifteen loosely linked CRM records, one per meter point, with no reliable roll-up of total annual quantity, blended rate or portfolio-wide contract exposure. Account managers reconstruct the portfolio view manually before every renewal conversation, pulling figures from separate rows in a spreadsheet that was last updated by whoever handled the previous renewal.

Commission and uplift are calculated outside the system of record

Agent commission, house uplift and clawback on early terminations are worked out in spreadsheets against supplier remittance statements, because the CRM was never designed to hold uplift per agent, per supplier, per contract term, or to reconcile what was paid against what was actually billed. Disputes over commission owed are common precisely because nobody can point to a single, auditable calculation.

Rate books are managed as loose spreadsheet files

Supplier matrix price files land by email on a rolling cycle, get saved to a shared drive under inconsistent file names, and expire without anyone checking whether the quote a sales agent issued yesterday is still valid today. Stale rates produce quotes that cannot be honoured, and an agent working from an outdated file has no way of knowing until the supplier rejects the switch.

Out-of-contract exposure is discovered too late

When a CED passes without a renewal being actioned, the site rolls onto an out-of-contract or deemed rate, which is materially more expensive than a negotiated contract. Brokers without CED-driven alerting find out from an angry customer holding a bill, not from their own system, and the reputational damage of that conversation is disproportionate to how preventable it was.

Compliance evidence is scattered across call systems and paper files

Letters of Authority (LOAs), consent records for outbound contact under PECR, and call recordings expected under Ofgem's conduct requirements for suppliers and TPIs live in three different places, none of which is linked to the account they relate to, which makes responding to a complaint or an audit slow and uncertain, and turns what should be a five-minute lookup into a half-day search across systems.

Regulatory context

What the sector has to satisfy

Ofgem TPI and supplier conduct: Ofgem's expectations for supplier and third party intermediary conduct in the non-domestic market cover sales practices, complaint handling and, in practice, the retention of call recordings that evidence what was said at the point of sale. Where a broker cannot produce that recording on request, a routine complaint can escalate quickly into a formal regulatory enquiry.
PECR: The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations govern outbound marketing calls and messages. Consent, or a documented soft opt-in, and suppression list checking against the Telephone Preference Service and Corporate Telephone Preference Service need to be captured against the contact record before an outbound campaign runs, not reconstructed afterwards from a call log once a complaint arrives.
Letter of Authority (LOA): Before a broker can request pricing or act on a customer's supply, most suppliers require a signed LOA scoped to specific meter points and a specific time window. Expired or missing LOAs are a common reason supplier quotes and switches are rejected or delayed, and suppliers vary in how strictly they enforce scope, which a system needs to track per supplier relationship.
UK GDPR: Customer and site data, including consumption history, is personal data where it relates to an identifiable business owner or sole trader. Retention schedules and processor arrangements with suppliers, comparison tools and third party lead sources are documented per project rather than assumed to be covered by a generic privacy notice.
Deemed and out-of-contract rates: A site that runs past its Contract End Date without a new agreement in place is charged at the supplier's deemed or out-of-contract rate, which sits well above negotiated pricing and is the specific exposure that CED-driven renewal alerting exists to prevent. Some suppliers apply deemed rates from day one after expiry; others allow a short grace period, and the difference matters to how far in advance alerting needs to fire.

Integration surface

The systems we connect to, named

Metering and market reference data

ECOESXoserveMPAN core and top lineMPRNData Communications Company (DCC)

Settlement data flows

ElexonD0052D0036half-hourly (HH) settlementnon-half-hourly (NHH) settlement

Supplier connectivity

supplier quotation APIsmatrix price filesEDI feedsportal scraping fallback

Outbound contact and compliance

call recording platformsTPS/CTPS suppression checkse-signature for LOAsPECR consent logging

Finance and billing

XeroSagesupplier remittance statementsdirect debit and payment gateways

Communication and identity

SMS gatewaysemail service providersMicrosoft Entra IDdocument e-signature

Solutions

What we build in this sector

Broker CRM development

Pipeline organised by Contract End Date, multi-site customer records built on MPAN and MPRN hierarchies, agent commission and clawback, supplier panel management and PECR-compliant contact tracking.

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Quote and tender engine

Bulk supplier rate ingestion, price book versioning, HH and NHH pricing logic, EAC and AQ inputs, pass-through elements, multi-site tender aggregation and comparison output.

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LOA and contract workflow

Letter of Authority capture, scope and expiry tracking, e-signature, contract issue and countersignature, and a single audit trail from authority to signed agreement.

Explore loa and contract workflow

Billing validation software

Automated checking of supplier invoices against contracted rates, standing charges and pass-through costs, flagging overbilling, missing discounts and deemed rate charges before they are paid.

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Portfolio management platform

A consolidated, group-level view of every site, meter point, contract and renewal date across a customer's estate, built for brokers managing multi-site accounts and consultancies reporting to procurement teams.

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Engagement shapes

Typical scope, duration and budget band

Discovery and scoping: Two to four weeks. Mapping of current CRM, rate book handling and supplier connectivity, identification of MPAN and MPRN data quality gaps, and a phased estimate that separates urgent renewal-risk fixes from longer-term platform work. Fixed fee, credited against the build.
Single-module build: A quote and tender engine or an LOA workflow module for one team. Typically 12 to 18 weeks. Indicative band £250,000 to £400,000.
Broker CRM platform: A full CRM built around CED-driven pipeline, commission and multi-site customer hierarchies. Typically 5 to 9 months in phases. Indicative band £400,000 to £850,000.
Portfolio and billing programme: Portfolio management and billing validation delivered alongside an existing CRM or as an extension to one built by us. Indicative band £300,000 to £650,000.
Managed run: Post-go-live support covering supplier rate feed changes, defined response times and a standing change budget, priced as a monthly retainer.

How discovery and scoping works

Questions

Frequently asked

Do you build software for energy brokers, TPIs and consultancies, or only for suppliers?

Our energy and utilities work is concentrated on the demand side of the market — third party intermediaries (TPIs), brokers, consultancies and multi-site portfolio managers who sell and manage business gas and electricity contracts on behalf of end customers. We are not a supplier billing engine vendor and we do not build metering or settlement infrastructure for network operators, though our systems consume settlement data flows and reference data that those parties publish.

Can you integrate with supplier quotation systems and rate matrices?

Yes. Most suppliers still distribute non-half-hourly rates as matrix price files in spreadsheet form, refreshed on a set cycle, alongside a smaller number of quotation APIs for live pricing. We build ingestion pipelines that parse both formats, version them, flag expiry, and normalise them into a single rate book your quoting engine reads from, so agents are never quoting from a file that a supplier has since superseded.

How do you handle MPAN and MPRN data across a multi-site portfolio?

Every meter point is stored against its full 21-digit MPAN core and top line, or its MPRN for gas, and every meter point is linked to a site, a contract, and a parent customer record. Portfolio-level reporting — total annual quantity, blended unit rates, contract end date spread across sites — is built from that hierarchy rather than reconstructed by hand from separate spreadsheets per site, and roll-up figures stay correct as sites are added, closed or moved between contracts.

What Ofgem and PECR obligations do you build in?

Where the software records or facilitates outbound sales calls, we build call recording and retention aligned with Ofgem's supplier and third party intermediary conduct expectations, and we build consent capture and suppression list checking aligned with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) for any outbound marketing contact. Where a Letter of Authority (LOA) is required before a broker can act on a customer's behalf, the system captures, dates and stores it against the account it authorises.

Do you replace our existing broker CRM entirely, or integrate alongside it?

Both routes exist. Some clients are outgrowing a generic CRM that was never built around Contract End Dates, MPAN hierarchies or commission structures, and choose a full replacement. Others keep a CRM for general relationship management and have us build the quoting, tender and commission layers as connected modules. We size this in discovery once we understand what the current system does well and where it breaks.

How is a typical energy broker or portfolio platform priced?

A single-module build such as a quote and tender engine, scoped for one team, typically starts at £250,000. A combined CRM, quoting and commission platform for a multi-site brokerage runs higher, delivered in phases so pipeline and renewal management is usable before billing validation and portfolio reporting are added.

Tell us what your systems are doing wrong.

Send the problem, not a brief. We will tell you whether it is a project we should be involved in.

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