Zero Friction helps heat suppliers, building managers and service providers with customer service and billing to their end customers. We have developed an easy-to-implement in-cloud solution that supports you in your daily administration and gives you advanced insights. 🚀

This section gives you some useful insights of Zero Friction's main data groups. These data groups, which we will call entities, are basically the pillars on which Zero Friction rests. Each entity has some underlying characteristics that will be briefly explained.

We identified the following entities:

We delve deeper into each section to give you all the information you need.

Let's start by introducing the first entity, because before we talk about meters and consumption, we need to take a step back and ask: where is the meter located? At what address? The answer is a location and location groups.
A service location is one of the most important entities in Zero Friction because it is the physical address where you provide one or more services (you could call them utilities) to your end customer. A location group is a collection of service locations that are related to each other either because they are in the same building or because they are part of one project with similar billing needs. Grouping service locations allows you to create a product with billing items by property group. All locations belonging to a group will have this product applied by default with the same billing timing.

Billing details can be specified for each pledge group, including a different IBAN bank account, logo, colors used on billing documents, contact information and billing standards (such as frequency of advance and invoice, payment period, product and invoice date).

When invoices are created for a service location contract that belongs to a location group, the location group settings are taken into account when generating invoices for that location.

To conclude this section, we also want to introduce these two concepts related to the previously mentioned entities: custom entity properties and move movement. Zero Friction allows users to define their own custom entity properties on customer, service location, contract, meter and location group by using custom entity properties. These properties can be used for billing purposes or to store additional information that Zero Friction does not track by default (you could call them custom fields if you use a CRM or other software). A move is a request received from customers requesting a new contract or terminating their existing contract through the customer portal. This option is available only if the customer portal feature is supported in your plan.

Now that we have explained the "where," we need to talk about the "what" and the "who." Let's introduce the next two entities, namely the meters and consumption and the customer.

One of the foundations of Zero Friction is receiving measurements from various measuring devices. We support meters of different brands and enable connection to both individual (meters at a service location) and shared meters (meters at location groups).

These measurements -collected on a regular basis- are then transferred and converted into consumption (the difference between two measurements) spread over the period between those two measurements. For example, if one measurement is taken per month, the consumption is spread equally over all the days in that month.

In practice, there may be a service location where hot water, heat, water, electricity, gas and other services are provided. This means there is one service location with multiple services and a contract that links the customer and their product (with specific rates and billing items) to the service location. We will explain later the different entities involved in this process, but this is already a good example to start with.

Let's move on to the next entities, specifically the customer:
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A customer is a person or an organization that has one or more contracts in a particular organization. This entity is important because it informs you about the type of subject who lives at that specific address. Zero Friction also allows you to add as much information about your customer as possible, such as contact details, bank details with standard fields or by adding custom fields if you are missing something. You can also calculate different VAT rates depending on whether the customer is an individual or an organization and we support social rates.

Do you already have a Customer Relationship Management software (CRM)? No worries, Zero Friction can connect to it. 💡 To learn more about this, please contact us at [email protected] or via the chat function.

It is now clear what the next steps will be: we have consumption and meters, we know they are connected to a customer living at a particular address. But how do we know how these entities are connected? Let's introduce the next entity, which is the contract. ⬇️

The next entity we want to introduce is the contract. A contract is a legally binding agreement that outlines the terms of a business relationship between a customer and the service location. Our solution, to bill your end customer, not only do you need to know which address is being served to which customer, but you also need to know which rate terms apply.

At Zero Friction, we work with products that easily group specific invoice items. Each product contains invoice items that can be fixed costs with a fixed price or variable costs that depend on consumption. The total amount on the invoice is the sum of all invoice items. Grouping invoice items into a product for a particular type of contract makes work easier because a product can be used for multiple contracts that follow a particular billing plan. Products can be easily updated with new prices and rates for a given period or year. When you update a product, it automatically updates all contracts in which it is used, so you don't have to update each contract individually.

Knowing this, you can establish a contract that ends with the invoices sent to your end customer.

Contracts can be entered into for any number of services provided at a location, but it is also possible for a contract to cover only specific services within the location. For example, a customer may contract for heating services but not for cooling services at a location that offers both.

A contract states not only what services are provided, but also how the customer will be charged for those services. This includes information such as the specific product being used, the frequency of the service and the bank account into which the charges will be deposited. By including these details in the contract, both the client and the service provider can clearly understand what is expected of each party and avoid any misunderstandings or disputes.

As a reminder, we have meters, connected to an address where a person or organization lives, and the end customer has contracted for a certain type of services with a certain frequency delivered to the served location (or location group).
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Once the contract is signed, the invoice (or multiple invoices if there is an advance invoice) is created and the end customer is invoiced. Invoices are automatically triggered by Zero Friction as long as the billing information is correct. Usually this means that the meter readings must be available for the start and end date of the billing period (in order to calculate the actual consumption) and that the tariffs and prices are configured for that period. Upon arrival at the end date of the billing period (this can be monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual, as defined in that contract), the bill is ready for approval.

If the system fails to create the invoices automatically because data is missing (e.g. no meter readings, missing prices/rates...), a manual intervention is required to create the invoice. The missing data must be added and the invoice creation must be triggered manually.

Congratulations!!! Your invoice has now been sent and you have collected payment. But what happens if the invoice is not collected?

Depending on the type of payment method (SCT or SDD), a SEPA mandate can be linked, allowing requests for direct debits. IBAN numbers are also used to automatically assign incoming manual transfers to the correct customer. More specifically, with respect to bank transactions, we have the following types:

Outgoing bank transaction:

A file that holds the requested transactions to the bank. There are two types of bank transactions that Zero Friction can request from the bank:

Incoming bank transaction:
An import of the bank statements of a given company bank account. On these statements we can see all successful SDDs and refunds, manual payments received and failed SDDs.

What exactly happens in Zero Friction when a payment is delayed? Our solution supports a collection process for following up on debtors with overdue invoices. A debtor cycle is started when an invoice's payment deadline (due date) has passed. This process can be activated in your organization's configuration settings.

All the different communications can be customized in your account settings, from the text on your invoices to the move request to the global translations (if you support your end customers with multiple languages).

When all invoices are paid, the accounts receivable cycle is automatically closed.
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Within the Zero Friction end-user application (or portal), customers gain online insight into their energy consumption, making billing and customer contact as accessible as possible. Processing the online move flow (called digital move) is easy and smooth, and all information is stored in a secure back-office application.

Thanks to this feature, end users are more aware of their energy consumption, allowing them to comply with the legal European obligation (from 1/1/2022) to provide monthly information on consumption and costs.

Already excited about this essential feature? We understand! The customer portal can also be purchased separately from our billing solution. It can be integrated into your business software using standard APIs.

Finally, the Zero Friction customer portal is positioned as a SaaS solution. This means that the portal is hosted and maintained by Zero Friction, but publicly available from the URL of your choice, for example myenergy.company.com. The end user will experience the customer portal as your own because it is published in your company's corporate identity. This means that the logo and colors will be customized for an optimal look and feel for your company.