Organizations are taking the initiative to collect data on utility consumption in order to provide sustainability reports to help improve their impact on society. The majority of the large cities in the US have different benchmarking ordinances that require large commercial, industrial, and multi-family properties to report their benchmarking compliance statistics. One of the challenges that these organizations find is that there is a large manual effort required when collecting and organizing the data to analyze for utility bill data management. As a result, organizations are searching for more cost-effective solutions for utility consumption and sustainability reporting.
Meeting Benchmark Ordinance Standards for Sustainability Reporting
Businesses that actively manage sustainability have an increased return of investment of 67% higher than companies that do not disclose emissions. Businesses that manage multiple properties or large-sized properties must comply with different ordinances to reach sustainability standards and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Utilities such as electricity, gas, and water must be reported on a timed basis broken down by utility type in order to meet compliance standards. GRESB, CDP, and GRI all require data that focuses on the comprehensive collection of self-reported environmental data. ENERGY STAR recently updated their score model for performance metrics requiring many property owners to make adjustments and changes on the EPA’s standard reporting process.
In a previous blog post, we talk about the challenges of utility data collection and how it originates from the manual nature of collecting utility bills and entering them into a system. Utility bills can be received in both a paper or electronic format and depending on the vendor, each utility bill has its own unique layout and units of measurement. Utility bill auditing allows businesses to maintain visibility and track consumption and cost. With more pressure on becoming more sustainable data investors, corporations, and regulators are becoming more competitive to make informed decisions in order to take action towards innovation to yield a greater return on investment.
Collecting utility consumption data not only helps businesses meet and report on sustainability standards, by analyzing this information the consumption usage can be minimized to reduce total utility costs.
ARDEM’s Utility Manager Streamlines Utility Consumption Data
Utility bills can be uploaded directly to the ARDEM Utility Manager or scraped from electronic invoices. With thousands of utility providers already in the ARDEM Utility Database, we can efficiently extract specific fields. Data such as meter number and total consumption can quickly be extracted and entered into a flat file for easy integration into your system or database. Detailed dashboards can be customized to provide visibility for datasets such as utility consumption or total cost per billing cycle. In addition to bill validation, ARDEM implements several layers of quality assurance using a combination of programmatic and manual quality processes to flag any discrepancies and ensure the highest of accuracy for a complete utility data management solution.
Contact ARDEM today to find out more about ARDEM’s Utility Manager and how we can make utility bill management for sustainability reporting stress-free!
