The need for data has been rising in demand for utility and sustainability providers. Utility data provides important historical and trend data that allows businesses to analyze and forecast usage as well as flag any discrepancies that may arise in a bill. As a result, there is increasing pressure for these companies to build a growing database of utility data that provides greater visibility. The challenge many of these companies are facing comes from the manual nature of collecting bills and entering them into a system. Utility bill management often requires collecting and normalizing data. In order to overcome the challenges of utility data collection, utility solution providers are searching for a more automated solution.
The Challenges of Utility Data Collection – The Manual Process
Utility bills are often provided in two ways: electronically whether it is emailed directly or downloaded from a website and mailed to an address in paper form. For in-house staff members to manually collect the utility bills, categorize them, and enter them into a system there is more time spent organizing the data rather than being able to utilize it. Another challenge that many businesses find is the inconsistency of when certain utility bills are available, and many of these utility bills come in different formats and units of measurement. While a website may say that they upload bills monthly on a specific date, more often than not these bills will be a few days late causing staff members to continuously check every day until it is available.
These types of bottlenecks make it difficult for energy and sustainability businesses to fully utilize data trends and make real-time decisions. In a recent disclosure law AB 802, it requires owners of commercial buildings to report annual energy consumption. Collecting utility bill data also helps aid large commercial building owners to submit energy use disclosures to follow energy commission standards. Similarly, there is more pressure on utility providers and consultants to remain competitive while finding new ways to improve their operational efficiency for utility bill data management to deliver customer satisfaction.
How ARDEM Transforms Your Process for Efficiency
How do most companies tackle the challenges of utility data collection? By outsourcing this process, a combination of technology and deep industry knowledge is utilized to provide the most efficient and cost-effective solution!
ARDEM utilizes a blend of technology and human intervention to develop a solution that provides speed, accuracy, and high data quality to improve your utility bill processing. For physical, mail we provide a personalized PO Box that will receive all mailed utility bills which are then sliced, sorted, and scanned into high-quality images. These images along with electronic utility bills that we gather for you can then be easily ingested onto the ARDEM Utility Manager where data capture is automated for efficiency. Utility bill auditing validates all bills and any considered to be suspicious will be flagged for further investigation. Running multiple layers of quality assurance, ARDEM ensures the highest accuracy using a combination of both programmatic and manual processes.
In order to increase your visibility, we also provide a customizable dashboard that allows you to view consumption metrics, accounting data, and monthly statistical reports. This data can then be downloaded in a file format that best works with your system for easy ingestion.
Find out more about Utility Data Collection Solutions and Utility Invoice Management, contact ARDEM today!
