Terms Hub
ENSEK - Energy Retail Glossary
A reference guide to key terms across energy retail - covering billing, finance, debt management, flexibility, and platform technology.
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Platform & Product Names
Ignition
ENSEK's core retail energy SaaS platform, covering the full customer lifecycle from onboarding and billing through to debt and market communications.
Flex
ENSEK's energy flexibility platform for orchestrating and monetising distributed energy assets such as EVs, batteries, and solar systems.
Ignition Technology
The full technology stack underpinning the Ignition platform - cloud-native, API-first, and built on an event-driven microservices architecture.
Flex Technology
The modular, cloud-native technology stack powering ENSEK's energy flexibility and distributed asset management services.
Energy Orchestration Platform
ENSEK's strategic platform direction - uniting Ignition and Flex to connect customers, tariffs, interactions, and connected technologies in one intelligent layer.
Core Solution Areas
Billing
End-to-end billing for domestic, SME, and I&C customers - covering real-time charge calculation, statementing, and payment management on a single system.
Customer Management
Tools for managing the full customer relationship, including account servicing, communications, and a 360° view of each customer's history and balance.
Onboarding
The end-to-end process of acquiring and registering a new customer, from initial quote through to contract sign-up and first bill.
Finance & Margin
Financial control, gross margin modelling, and revenue assurance capabilities that give finance teams a single source of truth across B2C, SME, and I&C portfolios.
Debt
Collections and payment lifecycle management - including payment adequacy checks, payment plans, and ring-fenced debt - to recover arrears and reduce bad debt.
Market Communications
Automated handling of industry data flows between a supplier and market parties, covering switching, metering, and settlement processes.
Insight & Analytics
Reporting and analytics capabilities giving operational and commercial teams visibility into customer, portfolio, and financial performance.
Energy Flexibility Solutions
Energy Flexibility
The ability to shift, reduce, or increase energy consumption in response to price signals, grid conditions, or automated instructions.
Whole Home Optimisation
Coordinating EV charging, solar generation, and home battery behaviour to minimise cost and unlock flexibility value across a customer's home.
Flexibility Monetisation
Generating revenue from distributed energy asset portfolios through market participation and smart charging programmes.
Proactive Fleet Health
Continuous real-time monitoring of distributed energy devices across a portfolio, identifying faults and connectivity issues before they affect performance.
Consumer Engagement Ecosystem
The tools, communications, and incentives that help customers understand and actively participate in flexibility programmes.
Technology & Architecture Terms
Cloud-Native
Software built from the ground up to run on cloud infrastructure, enabling automatic scaling, high availability, and continuous deployment.
API-First
A design principle where all platform capabilities are accessible via open, documented interfaces from the outset - making third-party integration straightforward.
Event-Driven Architecture
A design pattern where system components react to real-time events - such as a meter read or payment - rather than following fixed batch processes.
Microservices
Software built as a collection of small, independently deployable components so individual parts can be updated without disrupting the whole platform.
SaaS (Software as a Service)
Software hosted in the cloud and accessed on subscription - continuously updated by the vendor, with no on-premise installation required.
Device-Agnostic APIs
Open integration interfaces that connect with energy hardware from any manufacturer, avoiding lock-in to a single device supplier.
Single Source of Truth
A data principle where all teams work from one shared, authoritative record - reducing errors and reconciliation effort across systems.
Modular Platform
A platform built as configurable, independently adoptable components - allowing suppliers to adopt what they need and expand over time.
Interoperability
The ability of different systems to communicate and share data without friction - essential where suppliers connect with many industry and third-party systems.
Energy Market & Industry Terms
Market-Wide Half-Hourly Settlement (MHHS)
A UK regulatory programme replacing estimated consumption profiles with real half-hourly metering data for all electricity customers, enabling more accurate settlement and new tariff types.
Half-Hourly (HH) Settlement
Electricity settlement based on 30-minute consumption intervals - previously used mainly for large commercial customers, now being extended to all consumers under MHHS.
Non-Half-Hourly (NHH) Settlement
The legacy settlement approach for most domestic and small business customers, based on estimated or periodic reads rather than interval data.
Smart Meter
A connected meter that automatically records and transmits consumption data, removing the need for manual reads and enabling accurate real-time billing.
Pre-Payment Meter (PPM)
A meter type where customers pay for energy in advance by topping up credit via a key, card, or app.
Smart DCC
The Data Communications Company - the organisation managing the communication infrastructure that connects smart meters to energy suppliers across Great Britain.
MPAN (Meter Point Administration Number)
A unique reference number identifying an electricity supply point, used across all industry processes including switching, billing, and settlement.
Multi-MPAN
Accounts associated with multiple electricity supply points - common for commercial customers with multiple sites.
Time-of-Use (ToU) Tariff
A variable pricing structure where the unit rate for energy changes depending on the time of day, incentivising customers to shift consumption to cheaper periods.
Imbalance Costs
Costs incurred when energy delivered to customers differs from the volume contracted on the wholesale market.
Wholesale Costs
The cost of procuring energy on wholesale markets - the largest single component of a supplier's cost base.
Network Costs
Charges levied by distribution and transmission network operators for the use of their infrastructure to deliver energy to customers.
Customer & Operations Terms
Cost-to-Serve
The total operational cost of managing a single customer account, including billing, servicing, and exception handling.
Customer Lifecycle
The end-to-end journey of a customer relationship - from sign-up and onboarding through to billing, servicing, and offboarding.
360° Customer View
A unified view of all customer data - billing, payments, and service history - accessible in one place for agents and teams.
Self-Serve Portal
A customer-facing online interface for viewing bills, checking balances, making payments, and updating account details without agent assistance.
Payment Adequacy
An assessment of whether a customer's direct debit amount is sufficient to cover their actual energy consumption.
Vulnerable Customer
A customer who may need additional support due to financial hardship, health conditions, age, or other personal circumstances.
Ring-Fenced Debt
An outstanding balance separated from a customer's ongoing account, allowing historic debt to be repaid independently of current charges.
Bill Shock
An unexpectedly large energy bill, typically caused by a period of estimated billing or a direct debit set too low for too long.
Direct Debit
A payment method where amounts are collected automatically from a customer's bank account on a regular schedule.
Payment Plan
A formal agreement for a customer in arrears to repay their outstanding balance in affordable instalments alongside ongoing charges.
Arrears
The amount of money a customer owes to their supplier that is overdue or unpaid.
Proactive Credit Management
Using early data signals - payment behaviour, balance trends - to identify at-risk accounts before they fall into arrears.
Commercial & Financial Terms
Gross Margin
The difference between energy revenue and the direct costs of supply - the primary measure of commercial health in energy retail.
Revenue Assurance
Processes that ensure all delivered energy is accurately billed and collected, identifying gaps before they become a financial problem.
Unbilled Revenue
Energy that has been consumed and delivered but not yet invoiced to the customer.
Integrated Ledger
A single financial ledger combining billing, payment, and settlement data, eliminating reconciliation across separate systems.
Peak Exposure
The financial risk to a supplier from high-demand periods, when wholesale energy procurement costs spike.
Flexibility Markets
Organised markets where suppliers and aggregators sell distributed asset capacity to help balance the electricity grid.
Asset Portfolio
The collection of distributed energy devices - EVs, batteries, solar - managed by a supplier or aggregator on behalf of their customers.
Margin Leakage
The gap between the margin a supplier expects to earn and what is achieved, caused by billing errors, unrecovered costs, or settlement discrepancies.
Sector & Customer Segments
Retail Energy Supplier
A company that sells gas or electricity directly to end consumers - managing the full customer relationship from acquisition through to billing and support.
Utility
A broad term for organisations that supply essential services including gas and electricity to domestic and business customers.
B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
The domestic, residential segment of an energy supplier's customer base.
SME (Small and Medium Enterprise)
Small and medium-sized business energy customers, typically requiring more complex billing and account management than domestic accounts.
I&C (Industrial & Commercial)
Large business energy customers — the most complex segment, with Half-Hourly settlement, bespoke tariffs, and multi-site requirements.
Aggregator
A company that bundles the flexible capacity of many small, distributed energy assets to participate in grid services and flexibility markets.
Energy Service Provider
An organisation that delivers energy management or optimisation services - often operating alongside or on behalf of a licensed energy supplier.