Karbon Homes’ service charge automation and management platform
Karbon Homes was Commended in the Digital Transformation category at the Housing Technology Awards 2026.
Karbon Homes has around 34,000 homes and almost a third of its customers are leaseholders, paying annual service charges for the running and maintenance of their building and communal areas.
Spreadsheets everywhere
For the management of its £11m of annual service charges, the housing provider’s teams relied on over 900 disconnected spreadsheets, each needing to be updated individually. The annual task of producing charges was slow, repetitive and required extensive checking to ensure accuracy.
This inefficient process was chosen as the perfect project for Karbon’s ‘good to great’ business transformation programme.
A project group of colleagues from across the organisation was formed, and funding was allocated to develop a better solution to save time, ensure accuracy and minimise risk. The result was our development of ‘SCAMP’, our service charge automation and management platform.
In-house development
Rather than digitising the 900 spreadsheets, the project team, led by Karbon’s ICT team, redesigned the whole process from the ground up and built a single, shared system based on Microsoft Dataverse and a model-driven Power App.
Before developing SCAMP, the team assessed the market to see if there were any off-the-shelf products with the desired functionality. However, due to the complexity of our buildings, charges and calculations, coupled with long implementation times, we couldn’t find the right fit. This led us to creating an in-house solution instead, built in stages and using a flexible platform.
Delivered in a matter of months, the platform was built using a sprint-based approach to quickly develop and test new ideas and solutions. Working collaboratively as a cross-team group meant that those people who would actually be using the platform could give continuous feedback throughout its development.
The outcome is a working platform that has completely transformed how we manage our service charges.
Automatic updates
Our teams no longer have to populate or maintain over 900 spreadsheets because all of the data is now in one place. And by using Power Automate to handle the calculations, the resulting costs and totals are automatically updated whenever the figures change.
The service-charge schedules produced by SCAMP now have a single consistent format, and at the start of each financial year, these schedules can now be generated instantly at the touch of a button.
The system is fully integrated with our existing housing and finance systems to automatically import new service charges and budgets each year. The system also produces schedules that our mailing house can automatically apply to relevant letters to our customers.
SCAMP also lets us store historical information for reference, giving us better visibility of changes in our service-charge costs over time.
The programme’s wider impact
The implementation of the new programme has brought numerous benefits, both to the teams directly involved as well as the wider organisation.
It has massively reduced our manual efforts and has freed up a significant amount of capacity across our various teams. It has also improved the accuracy of our service-charge data, with information now updated just once rather than in numerous different places, with the consequent improvements in data accuracy meaning that our colleagues spend less time fixing and rechecking the data.
Our initial calculations suggest that the implementation of SCAMP has generated financial gains of around £27,000 annually, and storing and managing information better has also helped to reduce the gap between our costs and the income we receive by as much as £382,000 compared to the previous year.
Most importantly, the new system is bringing benefits to our customers who pay the service charges. Because our colleagues have greater confidence in the service-charge figures and clear ownership of the process, the result is better customer experience.
Clear and consistent information is helping to build to our customers’ trust in Karbon’s approach to service-charge management, and accurate, more detailed information is helping to minimise the number of customer enquiries and complaints.
A future-ready platform
The new platform is also setting us up for the future. By using Power Apps, Dataverse and Power Automate for SCAMP, we now have a platform we can build on. For example, applying inflationary uplifts can be easily added without reworking the entire system. It has also been designed to be ready for the changes arising from the government’s service-charge reforms, when prescribed formats will be required for service-charge schedules.
SCAMP is an example of how ICT teams can lead practical transformations in-house, in partnership with other teams. Using in-house capabilities and a mainstream Microsoft platform means that the system is flexible and capable, with expertise on-hand to enhance the system over time and solve any problems if they arise.
Jo Hamilton is the group director of ICT and digital at Karbon Homes. The housing provider was Commended in the Digital Transformation category at the Housing Technology Awards 2026.
