A worked example: one quarter's Ofgem return
Illustrative example
Riverside Court isn't a real network. The figures below are made up to be internally consistent, not copied from a real submission — they show how HeatReturn turns ordinary quarterly records into the numbers Ofgem's return asks for. Every figure is checked against Ofgem's own definitions, linked below each one.
The block
Riverside Court: 30 flats, one communal gas boiler, heat and hot water billed to residents through the service charge rather than a separate bill. The management company is both the operator and the supplier. This is the case HeatReturn is built for: a standard domestic network with heat bundled into a wider charge.
What went in — the quarter's records
Three ordinary records, kept through the quarter exactly as the quarterly reporting guide describes:
Complaints log
| Type | Count |
|---|---|
| Back billing | 1 |
| Quality of service | 3 |
| Customer service | 2 |
| Vulnerability, debt or switching | 1 |
| Pricing | 2 |
| Other | 0 |
| Total | 9 |
Arrears tracker
3 flats in arrears on the heat element of their service charge this quarter: 2 over £200 for three months or more, neither on a repayment plan; a third, behind since last quarter, now on an agreed plan. No self-disconnections, non-payment disconnections or involuntary prepayment switches (Riverside Court has no prepayment meters).
Tariff record
Standing charge: 40p/day. Unit rate: 9.0p/kWh. Both are the heat element separated out from the wider service charge, written down and applied consistently — see the service charge guide for the method. For a flat at Ofgem's 6,000 kWh reference usage, that's £686.00 a year of heat element inside a total service charge of about £2,150.00.
What HeatReturn calculates
From those three records, here's what goes into the return — Ofgem's own wording for each data point, linked to its source in the guidance:
- The number of complaints made, broken down by type
- 9See the breakdown above — Table 7, p20
- The number of complaints that were group complaints
- 1One quality-of-service complaint, raised by a nominated resident on behalf of six flats after a boiler outage — Table 7, p21
- The number of complaints resolved by the end of the next working day
- 4Fixed or answered by the end of the working day after they came in — Table 7, p21
- The number of complaints resolved within eight weeks
- 4Resolved after Day+1 but within 56 calendar days — Table 7, p21
- The number of complaints referred to the Energy Ombudsman
- 1The remaining complaint passed 8 weeks unresolved — a signposting letter was sent — Table 7, p21
- The number of domestic customers in debt
- 2Two flats with over £200 of the heat element outstanding for three months or more, neither on a repayment plan — Ofgem's debt trigger explicitly excludes anyone who is — Table 6, p18
- The number of customers on a repayment plan
- 1A third flat, in arrears since last quarter, now on an agreed plan — it no longer counts in the figure above because of that same exclusion — Table 6, p19
- Charges for customers at reference usage levels
- £686.00The one annual figure here — the rest are quarterly. Standing charge £146.00/year (40p/day) + unit rate £540.00/year (9.0p/kWh × 6,000 kWh) — Table 8, p24
8 figures shown here; a real quarter for a network like this has 18 quarterly data points in total — run the checker to see the full list for your own network.
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