LoRaWAN water meter management with automated invoicing.
A utility company needed to modernize 12,000+ water meters with IoT sensors, real-time dashboards, and automated billing, replacing decades of manual meter reading.
The short version.
A regional water utility was spending $380K annually on manual meter reading, sending field technicians to physically inspect 12,000+ meters across a sprawling service area. Readings were inaccurate, billing was delayed, and leak detection was purely reactive.
We built a full-stack IoT management platform using our custom software development approach that connects LoRaWAN-enabled water meters to a centralized dashboard. The system handles real-time consumption data, automated invoicing via MPAY integration, anomaly detection for leaks, and bulk meter provisioning via QR scanning and CSV imports. Field visits dropped 85% and billing accuracy hit 98%.
Manual meter reading doesn’t scale.
The utility had been reading meters the same way for 20 years: technicians driving routes, writing numbers on clipboards, manually entering data into a billing system. As the service area grew, this approach created compounding problems:
- Estimated billing: 30% of invoices were based on estimates due to inaccessible meters
- Leak detection delay: leaks went undetected for weeks until the next reading cycle
- Billing disputes: inaccurate readings led to constant customer complaints
- Rising labor costs: field teams couldn’t cover the expanding service area without hiring
- No consumption analytics: no way to identify usage patterns, peak demand, or infrastructure issues
The client had invested in LoRaWAN hardware (sensors and gateways) but had no software platform to manage the data, provision devices, or automate billing.
End-to-end IoT platform for water management.
We built a comprehensive management platform that bridges IoT hardware and business operations, from raw sensor data to paid invoices:
- Device provisioning: bulk meter registration via QR code scanning and CSV import, with automatic LoRaWAN network configuration
- Real-time dashboard: live consumption data, meter health status, network coverage maps, and alert management
- Anomaly detection: ML-based leak detection that identifies abnormal consumption patterns and triggers automatic alerts
- Automated invoicing: MPAY payment gateway integration with configurable billing cycles, tiered pricing, and automatic invoice generation
- Field service module: when physical visits are needed, the system generates optimized routes and digital work orders
- Reporting engine: consumption trends, revenue analytics, network health, and regulatory compliance reports
Sensor to invoice in real time.
The architecture handles the full data pipeline: LoRaWAN sensors transmit readings to gateways, which push data through a network server to our application layer. Every reading is validated, stored, and analyzed in real time.
Sensor to invoice | fully automated pipeline
We chose TimescaleDB (PostgreSQL extension) for time-series data, storing millions of meter readings with efficient querying for aggregation, trend analysis, and anomaly detection. The system processes 50,000+ readings per hour with sub-second dashboard updates. Read the technical deep dive on how we built this.
“We went from sending trucks to read meters to having every reading arrive automatically. The leak detection alone saved us more than the entire platform cost in the first year.”
Technical Director, Regional water utility
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