The Guide to Choosing the Best Desktop Utility Bill Tracking Software For Your Facility
ABSTRACT
Abraxas Energy Consulting performs commercial energy audits and provides utility bill tracking, energy auditing, measurement and verification, retro-commissioning, utility bill auditing and other energy management services for its clients world-wide.
Today's utility bill tracking software can deliver excellent results for energy managers who want to gain a comprehensive understanding of utility usage and costs in their facilities. All of the major commercially available utility bill tracking software programs are good at what they do, however, they are distinctly different in functionality and capacity.
Savvy energy managers have discovered - sometimes the hard way - the importance of selecting the appropriate software package to meet their needs. Before reviewing software packages, it is best to understand the needs of your organization and the resources available. Then you can compare each program's capabilities (such as budgeting and forecasting, temperature correction, rate analysis, report generation, etc.) against your needs.
Making the wrong choice can result in wasted time and hours of frustration, or worse - dissatisfied clients or management.
This paper will help you to identify what tasks you want to accomplish with your utility bill tracking software.
WHY NOT JUST USE SPREADSHEETS?
If you are tracking energy usage and costs for a handful of meters, a spreadsheet may be adequate; however, if you are tracking for a large organization with many facilities, or tracking savings from energy efficiency measures, then commercial energy accounting software may be the best and easiest way to track your utilities.
INTRODUCTION TO UTILITY BILL TRACKING SOFTWARE
All the major utility bill tracking software packages are good at what they do. However, they are all different and have different capabilities. Although you can track your utility bills effectively in any of the software packages, depending upon what your specific needs are, there is likely a program that is more suited to your needs than the others. Choosing the correct software package the first time can save you hours of work, and help you avoid the frustration of discovering too late that it does not produce what you wanted.
NARROWING DOWN THE SCOPE OF OUR ANALYSIS
In order to narrow down the scope of this presentation, we have made two rough classifications, which are detailed below. This paper covers desktop (not web-based) utility bill (not interval data) software programs.
Web vs. Desktop Applications
Using the web to track your energy usage is useful for large organizations. Large companies dispersed around the globe can enter their utility usage, and see reports comparing the usage in Lubbock to the usage in London. Central energy managers can then easily allocate energy costs across the enterprise and locate high usage facilities and concentrate efforts there. However, enterprise web applications are usually relatively expensive and often offer only basic analysis functionality. There are a great number of web applications available, most of which focus on interval (e.g. 15-minute) data.
There are also some internet bill tracking services that are relatively inexpensive. These applications will present your data to you on the web in a number of ways, but at present appear to be limited in analytical capacity and functionality. For example, these web services typically will not weather normalize utility data, which results in faulty year over year comparisons of utility bills. These web services are not addressed in this paper.
There are only a handful of utility bill software programs in the desktop market. Desktop applications usually offer more sophisticated analysis than their web brethren, and usually at a much-reduced price compared to web software. Many desktop packages offer some interface to the internet, such as downloading bill, interval or weather data, and creating html reports.
Interval Data vs. Utility Bills
Although there is considerable value to be found in analysis of interval data, there do not appear to be enough interval data experts to go around. Some organizations have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for interval data enterprise software, only to have it go unused, often due to lack of trained and available staff that can gain meaningful information from it.
Interval data can be used for several purposes, some of which are listed below:
-Determining when equipment is turned on and off
-Discovering and diagnosing equipment and controls problems,
-Load shedding,
-Aggregating energy usage across an enterprise into load profiles which can be used when procuring energy supply contracts,
-Applying rates to the interval data to get a better understanding of the hourly cost of running the facility.
Viewing utility bills in monthly (or billing) increments is a simpler discipline which is more comprehensible to management, more familiar to energy professionals, and more commonly practiced. Plenty of useful information about a facility can be gleaned from utility bills, some of which are listed below:
-Determining whether the facility is saving energy and utility costs
-Identifying the most wasteful facilities
-Identifying controls and equipment problems
-Budgeting and Forecasting
-Understanding where utility costs are going
-Performing rate analysis
-Verifying that the utilities are billing correctly
-Identifying changes in facility usage patterns
As the topic of this paper is Utility Bill Tracking, we will not cover interval data analysis here, however it is important to note that some desktop packages can handle both your utility bill and interval data, and can reconcile your utility bills with interval data.
SOFTWARE SELECTION CRITERIA
Perhaps the best method of determining the software program for your specific needs and budget is to clarify what you would want to use the software to accomplish. Below we have listed some of the tasks that utility bill tracking software can help you perform.
There is a comprehensive questionnaire at the end of this paper which will help optimize your software criteria.
-Are you more interested in utility accounting or energy analysis and saving energy?
-Do you need to identify the most inefficient facilities?
-Do you need to measure energy savings from your energy conservation projects or from performance contracts?
-Do you need to streamline your utility bill payment system?
-Do you need to create an incentive system to encourage employees to save energy?
-Do you need to verify that your utility bills are correct?
-Do you need to allocate costs from master meters to submeters and subsidiary accounts?
-Do you need to identify anomalous changes in utility usage?
-Do you need to understand the relationship between production at your factory (or occupancy at your hotel, etc.) and utility usage?
-Do you need to create budgets and track your utility costs against the budgeted costs?
-Do you need to evaluate different rate structures on your utility data to find the best rate?
Once you have determined your specific needs and budget, you can identify which software features are necessary accomplish these tasks. This section lists features and selection criteria with which you can sift through the software programs to find the one best suited to your needs.
Interfacing With Your Accounting System
Some software packages can interface with Accounts Payable for bill payment. Typically utility bills for a utility vender are aggregated and then can be exported for Accounts Payable. Some packages will create an export in any format you choose to accommodate existing accounting procedures.
Importing and Exporting Data
All software packages offer import and export of data. Usually you will have to properly format your data before importing it. Some packages will allow you to import data from the text format in which you receive it from the utility. This custom import format is usually created by the software provider or a consultant.
Baseline Modifications
Buildings occasionally change their usage patterns. These changes can lessen the usefulness of annual comparisons of usage and costs. For example, if you were trying to track savings on a building for which you had installed energy efficient lighting, and if the building subsequently adds a new computer lab (or a new addition, or a third shift) your building usage may increase. If you were trying to determine whether the building was saving energy from your lighting retrofit, you would no longer be able to separate out the reduction in usage from the lighting from the increase in usage from the new computer lab. Some software packages will allow you to make "modifications" to the baseline to account for the new computer lab (or new addition, third shift, etc.), which then allows you to determine what savings, if any, are attributable to the lighting retrofit.
Software Selection Questionnaire
If you answer these questions before you investigate different software packages, you are more likely to end with the software that is best suited to your organization. Don't be swayed by sales people and bells and whistles. Get the right software for your organization.
General
-How many meters will you be tracking?
-What is your budget?
Analysis
-Do you need to identify the most inefficient facilities?
-Do you need to measure energy savings from your energy conservation projects or from performance contracts?
-Do you want to compare year to year bills or use weather normalization?
-Do you need to identify changes in utility usage patterns and spot outlier bills?
-Do you need to understand the relationship between production at your factory (or occupancy at your hotel, etc.) and utility usage?
-Do you want to have the ability to modify your year to year comparisons for changes in usage patterns such as new equipment or building additions?
Accounting
-Do you need to streamline your utility bill payment system?
-Do you need to allocate costs from master meters to submeters and subsidiary accounts?
-Do you need to create budgets and track your utility costs against the budgeted costs?
-Do you need it to interface with your accounting system?
-Do you want to enter in every charge associated with your bill?
Data Manipulation
-How are you going to get data into the system? Importing monthly data files or hand entering?
-How fast can you manually enter data into the program?
Rates
-Do you want to verify that your utility bills are correct?
-Do you need to evaluate different rate structures on your utility data to find the best rate?
-Do you want to apply the current rate to before and after comparisons of utility costs?
Reports
-What type of reports do you want the software to generate?
-What are you going to do with reports when you get them? Print them? Email them? Modify them on your computer? Save them?
-Do you have special reporting needs? Will the software allow customized reports?
-Do you want to report on Emissions? (CO2, CO, NOx, etc.)
Staff
-How sophisticated is your staff?
-How much time can they devote to utility bill tracking?
-Do you have trained staff to use software?
Services
-Are you going to want to create your own bill tracking database, or are you going to have it done?
-How is technical support?
-Will the vendor be available to partner with you,
Also, be aware that most likely none of the packages available will have all of the features you want, or all of the features you want at a price your organization is willing to pay. In this case, you are going to have to prioritize the features in the questionnaire, and from there pick the software that handles the most important tasks your organization requires.
CONCLUSION
All of the major desktop utility bill tracking programs can be used to successfully track utility usage and costs. However each of the major desktop utility bill tracking software programs has useful features especially designed to fit certain situations. To ensure that your utility bill tracking project is successful, it may be best to understand exactly what you need to accomplish and who will be doing the work. Once you are clear on your objectives and personnel, you can select the program that best suits your needs and budget.
