Efficient Cost Management for utilities

Spending money like water? Throwing money down the drain?

Take back control of your energy and water costs with our Efficient Cost Management. Plan, budget and monitor better your costs when you integrate our ECM with your Facilities Management.

Over time we have discovered that nearly 20% of all utility invoices contain at least one error. We query on average 250,000 invoices per month and 3 million per year through a combination of automated validation and manual checks for over 65,000 client sites.

So far we have achieved over £115 million in savings and refunds for customers. We keep your costs and budget in control with our cost management consultancy.

The value you get

Meet the most thorough and efficient invoice validation in the industry that delivers concrete and actual savings to you. Our process of 47 points checked in every invoice is unrivalled in the industry. Our experienced data validators will double-check and analyse all your utility bills, ensuring the charges are correct and potential errors will be corrected. Whether you have 1 or 1,000 properties we will conduct the same in-depth validation double checks. We make sure your organisation is never being overcharged and guarantee suppliers are billing accurately. We check every single utility invoice for consistency and accuracy, instead of only 1 in 1,000 invoices. What’s more important, we import your billing data into our system and carry out a raft of additional checks. Our top-notch systems have been developed in-house by dedicated, knowledgeable industry experts, who have experience from a wide range of energy suppliers, meter operators and network operators.

We use your Asset Register as the basis for our thorough bill validation service. We receive all your utility/energy invoices, either directly from the utility suppliers or as a copy from you, and import them into sophisticated systems to carry out the automated bill validation process. We use the supplier EDI files of invoices for automated validation of energy invoices; original paper invoices we obtain for audit and double-checking purposes. We conduct a full audit of 47 checkpoints of all, including analysis that your consumption usage is in line with historic trends. We will then submit correct invoices for payment. They can also be automatically uploaded into your finance system (e.g. SAP, Oracle). Thus, we save you even more time as you do not have to manually enter each invoice. We scan invoices for payment and store them for a period of 6 years on a fully searchable Document Management System (DMS). See how our Payment System Integration option can help save you time and resources. The invoices which fail our detailed validation process we will query and log on the weekly Query Exceptions Report, detailing all the sites that have not passed. We submit the Query Exceptions Report to the energy supplier(s) in question for investigation within 24 hours of notification. We make sure the utility supplier takes the necessary corrective action so that you only pay the correct amount.

Our clients use a wide range of accounting software including Sage, SUN, SAP, ORACLE and Northgate, to name but a few. The regular payment reports we provide can be automatically uploaded into any finance/accounting system. They can be customised to meet any requirement you have, e.g. showing scheme, cost and supplier codes. We can also create payment reports with parent-child relationships identifying unique, multiple percentages split for each utility or utility account. All utility suppliers accept our payment reports as a remittance so that payments on group accounts can be allocated correctly against each invoice.

As part of our Online Reporting, we produce a Financial Accrual Report to indicate monthly budget position. We accrue an estimated cost figure for missing bill periods based on an algorithm, which incorporates anticipated usage based on historical usage and weather data for that period. The Accrual Report calculates the total number of missing days between input from and to date and then calculates an average expenditure per day using your approved invoices on the Monarch Matrix®. These two figures are multiplied together to determine an accrual value, which your finance department can then use to ensure that they have sufficient funds to cover their liabilities at each site.

Find out more about our Efficient Cost Management service or other ways in which we can help Facilities Managers.