Between unpredictable weather pattern changes, record heat waves, devastating storms, and raging wildfires, utilities remain under massive strain to keep up with unpredictable usage demands. Additional factors like regulations, tariffs, and grid constraints further impact energy budgets. As unforeseen costs and usage spikes remain rampant, especially for companies with multi-site portfolios, current energy budgets simply cannot keep up.
So, how can companies, their facilities managers, and other stakeholders work to establish a budget that both meets today’s demands and plans for the future?
With data.
When it comes to collecting data from utility bills, multi-site businesses face unique challenges. Thousands of invoices from hundreds of locations serviced by a host of individual utilities and suppliers put undue burden on multiple departments. Different systems, bill periods, and invoice-level details create variables that can make efficient utility expense and data management a struggle, resulting in missed invoices, late fees, shut-offs, or overpayments.
Paying bills correctly and on time is hard enough. Companies are under constraints to do additional analysis and spot overlapping service dates, billing and meter errors, spikes in consumption and demand, or other usage anomalies. To manage this volume of information, business decisions must not be merely informed by data; they must be built on data.