From AMP8 capital budgets to real-time cost control, invoice matching to cash flow forecasting \u2014 this is how MaxWater gives finance teams full visibility.
It’s April. The finance team is reviewing the annual capital programme under AMP8. MaxWater shows the full budget hierarchy: totex by programme, split by capital and operational expenditure, mapped to Ofwat’s cost assessment categories. Each line is drillable — from programme to project to work order to individual transaction. The finance director sees the macro picture; the cost accountant sees the detail. Same data, different lenses.
A new capital project comes in: upgrade 14 pumping stations to smart monitoring with Edge AI and IoT sensors. The business case is built inside MaxWater — costs, benefits, regulatory alignment, risk scoring, and the specific Ofwat output it delivers against. The investment appraisal routes through the governance workflow: technical review, regulatory check, finance sign-off, programme board approval. Each gate is time-stamped and audit-trailed.
Once approved, MaxWater tracks commitments in real time. Purchase orders against the project are captured as committed spend the moment they’re raised — before invoices even arrive. The finance team sees actual vs committed vs forecast at any moment. No more waiting until month-end to discover a project has overspent. The committed spend view is the single biggest gap in most water company finance systems. MaxWater closes it.
An invoice arrives from the IoT sensor supplier. MaxWater’s three-way match validates it automatically: purchase order → goods receipt → invoice. The amounts match to the penny. The invoice is approved for payment without manual intervention. For the 15% of invoices that don’t match cleanly — quantity discrepancies, price variations, partial deliveries — MaxWater routes them to the right person with the exact discrepancy highlighted. No hunting through emails or filing cabinets.
One project is trending 12% over budget. MaxWater detects the variance against the phased forecast and raises an alert to the project manager and finance business partner simultaneously. The root cause is surfaced: unexpected ground conditions at two sites requiring additional civils work. The alert includes the original estimate, current committed spend, forecast to complete, and recommended contingency draw. The finance team doesn’t discover this at month-end — they know today.
Every cost transaction is tagged with Ofwat reporting codes at source — the moment a purchase order is raised, not at year-end. When it’s time to submit the annual performance report, the finance team doesn’t need to reclassify thousands of transactions. The mapping is already done. Botex, enhancement, growth, resilience — every category pre-allocated. The regulatory finance team reviews and signs off. They don’t rebuild.
MaxWater’s finance module projects cash flow across the entire AMP programme, factoring in committed POs, expected invoice dates, payment terms, grant drawdown schedules, and seasonal capex phasing. The treasury team can plan borrowing months in advance — not weeks. When the CFO asks “can we accelerate the treatment works upgrade without breaching covenants?”, the answer is already on screen.
Real-time committed spend, automated cost allocation, and regulatory reporting built in from day one. No month-end surprises. No year-end panic.
