The ongoing pandemic has transformed everything from the daily course of life to the average business workflow. Just like all other operations, effective energy and utility bill management is proving to be a major challenge as companies struggle to maintain the regular pace of work.
A primary factor responsible for this struggle has been the continued dependence on manual processing and paper-based invoices/bills. As the abrupt shift to remote and digital-based processes becomes the norm, companies need to embrace the push for digitization in utility bill processing and energy management.
Additionally, despite all challenges presented by the pandemic, companies cannot put their energy management programs or energy-efficiency initiatives on hold as they wait for the ongoing situation to subside.
Every disruption comes with an equal opportunity for innovation and this is the time for organizations to really push for a digital shift in traditional utility bill and energy management. This is the time to automate and standardize processes; to centralize data collection and payment processes; and finally, to track and establish utility and energy consumption trends for energy efficiency.
So, without further ado, here are 10 reasons why you need to automate your utility bill and energy management:
1. Staying Prepared for the Unexpected
As the current situation has demonstrated, ongoing operations can be easily disrupted in the face of unprecedented situations.
Automating your utility bill and energy management enables you and your team to avail the convenience of a cloud-based workflow that is backed by the latest robotic process automation technology.
Every disruption comes with enormous late payment fines and additional operating costs in order to clear all dues. Automation ensures that your operations continue, come what may.
2. Measure Consumption
Keeping track of your paper-based utility bills can be quite a cumbersome task, especially if you need to map consumption trends and implement effective cost-control measures.
On the other hand, automating your utility bill management means that information is extracted from multiple data points on all incoming invoices including the no. of units consumed.
In turn, all this data can be centralized, indexed by date and recalled by week, month or quarter for analyzing metrics and defining average consumption. Once you have the numbers at your fingertips, it is easy to measure your current utility and energy consumption and strategize for further streamlining.
3. Shorten Your Utility Bill Cycles
Nothing stalls your utility bill cycle like a stack of unpaid invoices. Getting invoices cleared involves a laborious process during which the bills are to be assimilated, verified, sent for approval and finally cleared.
While a paper trail takes more time with invoices stuck in processing or just lying on a desk for approval, a centralized digital platform can make the entire process go much smoother.
The moment you receive either digital or physical utility and energy bills, an automated workflow can take the more tedious aspects of processing off your hands while improving approval and billing cycles.
As your billing cycle improves, you enjoy a much better relationship with your existing vendors and can even avail the benefits of exclusive offers reserved for best clients.
4. Assured Cost-Savings and Efficiency
Automating utility bill collection can drive up your savings drastically and it comes with two-fold benefits.
Firstly, by lifting and shifting your entire utility bill management, you can get your process executed at a fraction of the original cost and yet stay assured of the same quality of work.
Secondly, with the added efficiency of an automated workflow executed by a qualified team of process engineers and experienced analysts, you increase your savings with upgraded operations and avoid paying any late fees or dues.
Apart from this two-fold advantage, automating utility bill and energy management yields real-time statistics about usage and can be a useful aid in tracking trends over a period of time. As your team uses this data to implement energy efficiency measures to limit consumption, you keep getting higher returns on your investment.
5. Utility Bill Management
Fully automated utility bill management can transform your existing process by using a combination of advanced automation technology and effort-based processing.
At ARDEM, we streamline your entire utility bill process to increase accuracy, shorten your turnaround times, and reduce your operating costs.
We manage everything from the receipt of the utility bills until final payment and design an automated workflow to streamline the entire utility bill management process and prevent any late fees.
Our extensive utility database has mapped out thousands of different vendors making our clients’ utility bill data management a breeze.
6. Improve Energy Management
Processing utility and energy bills comes with a considerable amount of challenges due to the variance between service providers. The incoming invoices are all in different formats and all this data has to be sorted, aggregated and standardized to get impactful analytics.
At ARDEM, we combine advanced data capture technology and proprietary data entry methodology to streamline energy bills processing by supporting and standardizing all utility formats, promising close to 100% accurate data and delivering real-time results.
The live updates and indexed invoices have an important role to play in your energy management policies as a repository of your energy data and previous analytics.
7. Sustainability Reporting
Automation has transformed the way people view utility data by providing smarter and more reliable insights for sustainable operations.
At ARDEM, once the data is captured from utility bills, it is streamlined to view statistics across all accounts, meters, and locations.
Using the ARDEM Utility Manager, you and your team can gain access to push-button reporting and identify the best methods to lower costs and achieve sustainability goals.
8. ARDEM Utility Manager
The ARDEM Utility Manager allows you to easily track consumption and spend data for all of your utility bills. The cloud-based digital collaboration platform helps increase your visibility in order to lower costs and improve sustainability efforts across all locations.
How It Works:
- Login: Sign-in and gain access to your workspace and view the progress of all received utility bills in real-time.
- Upload Utility Bills: You can easily upload your utility bills with a simple click and they are immediately ingested into the processing cycle.
- Data Extraction: During our automated processing cycle, the different data fields from utility bills are extracted into a flat-file.
- Ready-to-Use Data: Utility bill data will be available for download in your preferred file type format to be ingested into your system.
9. Tracking Renewable Energy
Automating your utility bill management can further assist in tracking the use of renewable energy and helps contribute towards your sustainability goals and reduce the cost of utilities.
Additionally, this historical database of renewable energy can be utilized to efficiently reduce utility vendor costs by enhancing your utility bill and energy data management.
10. Advanced ESG Management
Automating your utility and energy data management is a smart move that helps you achieve efficiency goals by managing the energy conservation efforts for ESG Grade building investments.
Effective ESG compliance further leads to higher long-term profitability, lower risks, and a positive investment impact.
So, what are you waiting for? Embrace the future, we say and automate your utility bill management to improve energy efficiency and your savings.
At ARDEM, we tailored a customized automation solution for your utility bill and energy management. We are an ISO27001-certified company and secure your data even as we process it.
If you are still wondering whether we are a good fit, give us a call to find your solution.