Our service charge maturity assessment is a fantastic way of understanding a baseline maturity for your service charges, but also providing assurances for current performance, highlighting opportunities to improve and measuring progress as you implement new ways of working. Whether used within your team, or to provide assurance to boards and other interested parties, it is something that can be re-run periodically to ensure you continue your journey towards excellence.  

Service reviews are often requested by organisations who either do not have a clear process for delivering service charges (it’s an annual scrabble) or their processes feel clunky, wrongly resourced, or disjointed.  A service review is a highly participative and interactive exercise, bringing together groups of operational staff and leaders to analyse how things are done currently, the effects of this on customers (internal and external), identifying what needs to change to deliver improvement and to design better processes and ways of working.   

Delivering the never-ending service charge cycle is hard enough. Making improvements is like fixing a plane in mid-air. So many teams struggle on each year because they simply do not have the capacity required to deliver business as usual and change. Whether you require coordination of an improvement plan or additional support to deliver the changes, we have the capacity and capabilities to add pace to your improvement efforts, and we will work closely alongside your team, so they feel invested in the changes being made.   

Service charges can be complicated. The combination of changing legislation, lease terms, long end-to-end processes and increasingly challenging developments requires a unique skill set and an understanding of best practices that are not always available within your organisation. Perhaps you need some external assurance or some guidance on service charge systems? Perhaps you just want access to support as your service and team grows? Whatever the challenge, our retained support service can help. Having access to time with our experts who can assist and guide you and your organisation to solve the challenges you face and generate better practices. Our flexible retainer hours are purchased as a bundle and can be drawn down on and topped up as and when you need them.

Whether it’s because of peaks and troughs in workload, staff absence or a difficulty in recruiting the right people, you might find yourselves with a capacity gap in your service charge team. Our service charge experts can hit the ground running and slot in to fill these gaps for you. We can increase capacity in your team (because of absences), help cover peaks in workload, help with key deliverables, lead and build your service charge function, assist with recruitment and onboarding, support and upskill the team, utilise our connections to obtain additional support and lower fees. 

Whether you have a service charge system and you want to optimise its use or are considering your options for moving away from spreadsheets, we can help. Our team has extensive experience in delivering service charge systems from specification and tender, right through to making the most of the system post go-live. We have: an understanding of the lifecycle for system delivery; an understanding of different products available on the market and relationships with the various suppliers; delivered service charge systems within Housing Associations; extensive change management skills.   

Our training will embed the awareness and skills/capabilities required for a Housing Association to deliver service charges effectively, including your front-line staff, service charge specialists, your management teams, executive and even board. Training at levels 1 & 2 are delivered as e-learning modules and comes with 12-months of access that can be renewed annually. Level 3 & the Executive/Board training sessions are delivered in-person. See our brochure above for guidance about who is ideal for each level.

If you’re unsure where to start, our free online Service Charge Self-Assessment is a helpful tool to pinpoint specific areas for improvement for your organisation. Click the button below to start now.