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Utilities & Council Tax Handover

Example prompt: "When I log a check-out in our Google Sheet, draft notification emails to the gas, electric, and water suppliers with the closing meter readings, draft the council-tax change-of-occupancy letter, and chase any supplier that hasn't acknowledged within 7 working days."

The Problem

When a tenancy ends and another begins (or the property goes vacant), the office has to tell the electric supplier, the gas supplier, the water supplier, and the local council — each with the right closing reading, the right outgoing-tenant forwarding address, the right new-occupant start date, and the right tone. None of it is hard; all of it is annoying; and the cost of getting it wrong is that the outgoing tenant rings six weeks later to complain about an estimated final bill that was estimated because the office quoted the wrong meter type, or the new tenant gets a council-tax demand for two weeks before they moved in because the council was never told who the new occupant is. The office knows the readings (they are in the clerk's check-out report) and knows the new tenant's start date (it is on the tenancy), but stitching the two into eight or twelve outgoing emails per property turnover is the kind of work that gets pushed to Friday afternoon and forgotten.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that walks the utilities handover pipeline every weekday morning, picking up tenancies that have ended in the last fortnight and tenancies starting in the next fortnight, and drafts the relevant supplier and council notifications for each one. The closing readings come from the check-out report; the opening readings come from the tenant's welcome-pack reply; the suppliers and supplier account references come from a per-property Supplier Register tab the office maintains. A NULL reading skips that fuel's notification with a manager flag rather than letting an estimated final bill go out and surface as a complaint later — except where the property has a smart meter for that fuel, in which case the supplier reads the meter independently and the workflow drafts the notification with a "supplier reading authoritative" note. The Glass Box preview shows every drafted email side-by-side so the manager can see all four suppliers and the council for a single tenancy in one review pass rather than four. A Monday chase pass nudges suppliers that have not acknowledged after seven working days, capped at two automated chases before the case moves to a manual phone call.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (scheduled): Every weekday at 9am.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read Tenancies for status 'Ended' (last 14 days) and 'Signed — awaiting move-in' (next 14 days). For each, read the relevant readings tab (Check-out for ending, Move-in for starting) including per-fuel smart-meter flags.
  3. Step 2 (code): For each fuel, skip with a manager flag if the reading is NULL AND smart_meter_ is not TRUE. Where smart_meter_ is TRUE, draft the notification with a 'supplier reading authoritative' note instead of a meter figure.
  4. Step 3 (integration): For each (tenancy_id, fuel_type, side) triple, dedupe against the 'Utilities Handover Log' tab and draft the supplier change-of-occupancy Gmail with the reading, the outgoing tenant's forwarding address (or 'TBC'), and the new occupant's start date if known.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Draft the council change-of-occupancy Gmail per tenancy using a 'Council Contacts' tab matched on postcode prefix, and append a council row to the same Utilities Handover Log (fuel_type 'council') so the chase pass covers it.
  6. Step 5 (integration): Append a Utilities Handover Log row for each drafted artefact with handover_id, tenancy_id, fuel_type, side, drafted_at, recipient_email, draft_email_link, supplier_acknowledged_at NULL, status 'Drafted — awaiting manager send'.
  7. Step 6 (conditional): Monday 10am — chase any row where status is 'Sent — awaiting acknowledgement', sent_at is more than 7 working days ago, and supplier_acknowledged_at is NULL. Cap at 2 chases before the case moves to a manual phone call.
  8. Step 7 (integration): Post a consolidated Slack message in #utilities-handover at 9:30am with end-side, start-side, council drafts, and the list of suppliers awaiting acknowledgement for more than 7 working days.

Integrations Used

  • Gmail — drafts every supplier notification, every council notification, and every chase
  • Google Sheets — Tenancies, Properties, Supplier Register, Council Contacts, Forwarding Addresses, Check-out Meter Readings, Move-in Meter Readings, Utilities Handover Log
  • Slack — the #utilities-handover channel for the morning digest and the chase-awaiting list

Who This Is For

Letting agents and managing agents handling residential portfolios where every property turnover triggers four or five outgoing notifications and where the office cannot afford to let an estimated final bill surface as a tenant complaint two months later.

Time & Cost Saved

A full utilities handover for one property is twenty to forty-five minutes of drafting and looking up account references. Across eight to fifteen turnovers a month that is half a working day to a working day reclaimed, and the harder-to-quantify saving is the absence of the six-weeks-later complaint email — the kind of email that consumes an hour of the manager's afternoon to apologise for and is entirely preventable by sending the right reading the first time.