Utility Data Automation – What It Means and Why It’s Important

Traditionally, utilities would send companies their monthly utility bills and it would be up to the company to manually extract and track their utility data in Excel spreadsheets to capture trends, identify errors in billing, and determine overall performance. This is not only a time-consuming and tedious process, but also prone to error. Enter, utility data automation.

In this article, we’ll explore what utility data automation is, why it’s important to your company, and how an energy and sustainability management platform like WatchWire can help you automate your utility data.

What is Utility Data Automation?

Utility data automation is the process of automatically acquiring utility invoice data directly from utilities. Ideally, the platform will capture each and every line item and categorize them into their respective component buckets – consumption, demand, flat charges, taxes, and miscellaneous fees.

Why Is It Important to Automate Your Utility Data?

There are multiple benefits to utility data automation, like:

• Less time sifting through spreadsheets and more time to focus on your company’s sustainability goals.
• A single source of truth for all your utility data.
• The ability to analyze utility data against business KPIs.
• The ability to easily generate electric, steam, natural gas, and water budgets based off your actual historical invoice data, combined with various independent variables like weather, occupancy, and more.
• More accurate, complete data available for your sustainability reporting and measurement and verification

How WatchWire Can Assist

WatchWire is an integrated energy and sustainability management platform that provides utility data  automation along with utility bill management. In addition to delivering all the benefits listed above, WatchWire:

• Statistically audits your utility bills as they are integrated, alerting your team of any anomalies.
• Allows your audited utility data set to be directly integrated with your accounts payable software to streamline the payment of bills.
• Provides you with over 30 standard reports, so you can generate reports based on specific line items to find consumption/demand/cost trends, weather impact, budget performance, facility comparisons, KPI analysis, and more.
• Uses the line-item component breakdown in our Measurement and Verification module to accurately calculate true marginal cost savings due to efficiency projects (rather than simple average unit cost, which is incorrect and potentially misleading).

To discover more about WatchWire and its capabilities, you can visit our website, blog, or resource library, request a demo, or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter to keep up-to-date on the latest energy and sustainability insights, news, and resources.