Five Most Common Pitfalls in Utility Billing for Property Professionals

Whether you are a facilities manager, property manager, or lease manager, when your building has an embedded network, utility billing becomes something you must get ‘right’. Here are the top five pitfalls commonly found around the industry.

In each pitfall area identified, we have included how Bill-HD has been designed to help. Those are formatted as “call-outs” to make it much easier if you just want to read about the problem descriptions independently (or if you just want to read about our solutions!).

1. Bill period and meter data end date mismatches

We all know that the ‘human friendly’ way of billing is to bill by the month, or quarter, or anything that makes easy sense to avoid confusion. But meter readings might not ‘care’ about ‘human friendliness’ - what do you do when a reading is lacking behind, either because your smart meter is for some reason no longer online, or because your manual readings did not make it in time?

Faced with pressure to issue the invoice out and close the period, we are sometimes left with rushed decision making: “we will bill them back next month” or even worst - “just write it off”…

While seasoned professionals are capable of managing these situations just in the head, the reality is when there are more than five, sometimes a dozens of metering issues of different types, we start to lose grip.

This is where Bill-HD’s prebuilt algorithms come in - we are designed to prevent all those ‘unfortunate’ metering situations for you!

The Bill-HD algorithm clearly distinguishes when the meter has a behind date, automatically capturing backtracked charges.

2. Bad readings resulting in tenant complaints and unnecessary admin works to refund

Bad readings are of prevalent presence because of the ‘variety’ of error causes:

a human has made a wrong meter read

electrical issues (e.g. the CT ratio is not configured correctly)

wrong meters-tenant relationship mapping

network errors (e.g. a meter has lost its network configuration)

consumption anomalies due to unexpected site interruptions (e.g. a new load has been mistakenly added to the meter)

The Bill-HD algorithm catches consumption anomalies as the data is ingested/inputted and puts faulty meters on hold, preventing tenant credit claims from ever occurring; Bill-HD also employs data science algorithms to help identify historical anomalies and alert on unexpected loads.

3. ‘Forced’ write-offs and unnecessary discounts

When you have no valid readings to show for, you could use estimation, but many people end up giving the tenants discounts because the estimation (as the name suggests) can come across as inaccurate, especially when the calculation is documented on a piece of paper with handwriting.

The Bill-HD algorithm utilises all the historical data available to make an accurate ‘predictive resample’ - yielding data with intervals down to minutes. If the readings are recovered later on, the Bill-HD platform maintains data continuity - i.e. if the predictive resample undershot and charged too little, the calculated difference is automatically added in the next bill (and vice versa).

4. Wrong tariff

There usually are laws and legislations or tenant lease conditions that dictate what you can charge or cannot charge. Comes with the requirements is the need to periodically review and update the tariff for each tenant you are oncharging. Failing to do so (wrong tariff) results in lost revenue if the tariff is set too low while your energy cost has increased, or overcharging if the tenant qualifies for a cheaper tariff but you haven’t detected the need for change in time.

As part of the Bill-HD service, we can custom build tariff for your company (or follow your direction to subscribe to any publicly available tariff). The tariff updates and management are tightly integrated with the data source and you don’t need to manually remap or change the tariff.

5. Insufficient coordination between departments

A typical workflow is for the facilities managers to manage the equipment and meter readings and the lease managers to manage the tariff and invoicing, then involve accounts when it comes to reconciliation. There are a good number of moving parts for each billing cycle, meaning a correspondingly good number of chances for things to go wrong - most evidently - communication.

It’s always ‘too’ convenient for us to try to build our own spreadsheet to do our own bit of work and pass it down the line to let others figure it out. After all, “that’s what I got from the person before me; what do you expect?” This, plus the emails, attachments, sometimes teams or even SMS, can cause ‘information chaos’, making the billing work process very opaque. It all goes well until someone questions the data and you would need to become the ‘detective’ trying to follow the data path.

Potential impacts:

Delayed billing cycle due to additional confirmation

Additional admin work (and sometimes refunds) to handle customer disputes if errors are made

Lost data (e.g. when someone leaves the job, the work spreadsheet/calculation could no longer be found)

The Bill-HD platform stores the data for you, allows multiple users to access the same data as you (or a subset of your permission level). Bill-HD relies on prebuilt algorithms and data flow automations to make the experience effortless. When your whole billing cycle is cared for on Bill-HD, there is almost zero room for errors caused by bad coordination as everybody would be working with the same data at all times, with guardrails imposed by our validation algorithms.

Final Words

Data related problems reveal themselves throughout the billing cycle, sometimes in a few years after any mistake is made. When managing a commercial/retail lease, the last thing you want is that your non-core revenue stream (i.e. utility billing) exposes you to major risks - legal or commercial. With Bill-HD, we provide the means for your data to be high quality and your billing works effortless manageable, leveraging the prebuilt validation algorithms and leading data management practices. Sign up for more!

Alternatively, if you have any questions or a custom demand, please contact us at info@Bill-HD.com