Our Services
Maturity Assessment
Our Service Charge Maturity Assessment helps Housing Associations understand how effectively their service charge function is really operating, not just whether it is compliant. The assessment provides a clear, evidencebased view of current performance, capability, risks, and opportunities for improvement across the end-to-end service charge process. Much more than a traditional audit, the assessment explores how well your service charges support accuracy, transparency, recovery, customer trust, operational efficiency, and long-term sustainability. The outcome is a practical improvement roadmap that helps organisations prioritise the changes most likely to deliver meaningful impact. The assessment can also be re-run over time to measure progress, provide ongoing assurance to leadership teams and Boards, and support a structured journey towards service charge excellence.
Service Review
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.
Coordination and delivery of improvement plans
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.
Retained Support
Service charges are increasingly complex. Changing legislation, evolving customer expectations, complex lease arrangements, and growing operational demands mean many organisations need specialist expertise that is difficult to maintain in-house at all times. Whether you need external assurance, practical guidance on service charge challenges, support developing better processes, or simply access to experienced specialists as your service evolves, our retained support service provides flexible access to expert help when you need it most. Unlike traditional consultancy support, our retained hours model gives you ongoing access to practical, sector-experienced specialists who understand the realities of delivering service charges within Housing Associations. Support can range from advice and troubleshooting through to reviews, coaching, project support, and critical friend challenge. Hours are purchased as flexible bundles that can be drawn down and topped up as required, giving you responsive support without the need for large consultancy commissions or lengthy procurement exercises.
Service Delivery Support
Peaks in workload, staff absence, organisational change, and difficulties recruiting specialist resource can all create capacity gaps within service charge teams. Our experienced service charge specialists can integrate quickly into your organisation, providing practical support and continuity while helping maintain performance, delivery, and customer confidence.
Support to Optimise, Scope or Implement New Systems
Many organisations are looking to improve the use of their existing service charge systems or move away from spreadsheet-based processes altogether. Our team has extensive experience supporting Housing Associations through the full service charge system lifecycle, from requirements definition and procurement through to implementation, optimisation, and embedding new ways of working.
Our support includes:
Defining requirements and developing specifications
Supporting procurement and supplier selection
Advising on available products and market options
Implementation and operational readiness support
Process redesign and optimisation
Change management, training, and adoption support
We combine practical service charge expertise with operational improvement and change management experience to help organisations implement systems that genuinely support better delivery.
New Development Budget Setting
We support Housing Associations to develop accurate, practical, and sustainable service charge and reserve fund budgets for new developments. Our approach goes beyond simple calculation to ensure charges are transparent, recoverable, affordable, and operationally deliverable from day one. We benchmark proposed charges against local markets and comparable schemes, helping organisations understand how developments compare competitively, while also identifying opportunities to influence, reduce, or design out unnecessary costs before they become embedded for the long term. The result is stronger financial confidence, reduced future operational challenges, and service charge models that are fit for the future.
Service Charges Skills Development/Training
Our training helps Housing Associations build the knowledge, confidence, and skills required to deliver service charges effectively across the organisation, from frontline teams through to executives and Boards. Our core offer ranges from introductory awareness sessions through to advanced service charge excellence, delivered through flexible e-learning modules, in-person workshops, and executive or Board sessions focused on strategic oversight and organisational impact. Alongside our standard programmes, we now offer a bespoke capability assessment and skills development service. We assess your team’s current strengths, weaknesses, knowledge gaps, and capability risks before creating and delivering a tailored development plan designed around your organisation’s specific needs and priorities.
Lease & Tenancy Agreement Assurance
Your leases and tenancy agreements determine what you can charge, how you can charge it and, in some cases, how those charges must be calculated. But historic practice or the way an agreement has been classified doesn’t always reflect what the underlying clauses actually say. We regularly find, for example, agreements described as ‘fixed’ where the provisions indicate something different. When assumptions like these are applied across a whole cohort of properties, the impact can quickly become significant.
Our Lease & Tenancy Agreement Assurance service helps you understand what agreements you have across your stock and validate the assumptions being used to make service charge decisions. We can start with a proportionate validation check, identifying agreement types and cohorts and reviewing an appropriate sample from each, or undertake a full review of every agreement where agreement-level assurance is needed. We’ll create a clear picture of what your agreements allow you to charge for and how, highlight inconsistencies or exceptions, and flag anything we think would benefit from further investigation or a legal opinion.
Not sure what support you need?
Every organisation is different. Whether you have a specific challenge in mind or simply know something needs to improve, talk to us about what’s happening and we’ll help you work out the right next step.
Email: hello@ad-esse.com.