For business owners and managers, utility bill data management and the processes therein are often simply a ghost in the machine that keeps an office, production facility or other commercial property going. Typically, they’re hardly noticed unless an outage occurs or some other issue arises.

Dealing with the bills from a varied and potentially wide assortment of utility providers, however, is much more of a regular responsibility, one that can sprawl beyond control without careful management and clever application of the right tools.

When multiple facilities are involved, the challenge becomes even greater. This holds especially true for energy management solutions providers that coordinate the utility bills and all related data for businesses overseeing a multitude of different buildings, such as real estate developers.

As such, making the move to consolidate your company’s regular utility bills by adopting ARDEM’s utility invoice management and utility bill auditing can be a major boon to your overall efficiency.

Let’s break down the advantages that come into play when using ARDEM for utility bill processing:

Bridging the format divide for utility bill management

Unlike, say, the Common Application that is used by thousands and thousands of different colleges, there has been no standardization of format across the field of utility bill management. The hundreds of electricity, natural gas, oil heating, water and telecommunications carriers throughout the U.S. may all have entirely different spatial arrangements, or be delivered electronically in a variety of file types rather than one single format. This naturally impedes processing because of the variations between the data.

ARDEM’s solutions offer a way around this potential pitfall. Our capture technology and programmatic data validation processes were devised with the issue of multiple formats in mind. Everything from plain text and .PDF to .JPEG, Rich Text Format and email can be handled with accuracy and ease.

Uniform method of measurement

For obvious scientific reasons, the units of measurement for essential utilities like water, electricity and gas vary – power doesn’t come in gallons and water doesn’t flow in kilowatt-hours, after all. Different telecom providers will measure internet bandwidth or premium services in numerous ways as well. Appropriate streamlining and normalization of data can greatly improve the workflow for energy management professionals and other personnel with similar responsibilities, such as property managers in large urban areas.

Choosing to outsource data entry services for utilities to ARDEM affords you the benefit of high-level automation and validation, so the data you receive is segmented into a small number of categories and thus more easily utilized in essential decision-making. Additionally, our data entry solutions are guaranteed to 99.97 percent accuracy.

Embracing cost efficiency

Considering how high utility costs can rise for multiple properties and how that carries over to companies tasked with quantifying and mitigating those costs, it’s prudent to find savings opportunities whenever possible. In addition to their aforementioned capabilities, ARDEM’s data and document processing solutions can provide energy management firms and property owners with a notable reduction in processing expenses. This figure can drop by as much as $40,000 per month from what it would be if in-house methods were used.