It’s estimated that heating, cooling, and lighting costs often account for more than 70 percent of a commercial building’s total energy usage, with additional energy costs representing an additional 19 percent. Noting this, it makes sense to identify ways to reduce energy usage and save money. Utility expense management is one strategy that can help accomplish this.
What is Utility Expense Management?
Utility expense management involves tracking what an organization or property pays toward utilities. More specifically, it involves collecting, analyzing, and tracking utility costs and consumption data to help determine areas for improvement and where costs can be cut. Based on any historical data gleaned during the utility expense management process, property managers can more easily spot any billing errors and determine strategies for reducing energy consumption.
Benefits of Proper Utility Expense Management
Save Money
Perhaps the biggest benefit associated with utility expense management is the opportunity to better manage your property and save money on utilities. Any savings on utilities translates to reduced overhead expenses, which can help improve your company’s bottom line. In addition to helping identify strategies to reduce utility usage, utility expense management can also help resolve any metering issues, overlapping billing periods, or other errors in billing that may be costing your property money. Reducing utilities also helps lower your property’s carbon footprint.
Simplify Bill Payment Process
Utility expense management can also help simplify the overall bill payment process and consolidate statements into a single file to make it easy to pay bills on time and better stay on track.
Gain Valuable Insights
You can’t manage your billing costs if you don’t know what they are. That’s one of the big benefits of utility expense management – knowing your costs and being able to crunch any historical data to optimize your energy usage further. Utility bills aren’t always the easiest things to understand, but taking the time to know what you pay, why you pay certain rates, and just assessing your overall energy usage can go a long way toward determining usage and learning ways to save money.
What Are the Steps in Utility Expense Management?
The first step is finding a consultant that you’re comfortable working with that can help you get started. From here, this consultant can help set up a centralized portal to provide easy access to your utility bills to make them easy to view and monitor. Once this centralized portal is set up, new data can be easily entered and current data can be more effectively analyzed and monitored to learn trends, identify errors, and determine ways to optimize energy usage. You’re also able to integrate invoice and payment details into any existing accounting software that you use to ensure on-time payments are made.
Call Green Line Rates for all Your Utility Management Needs!
For more information on utility expense management and to get started, contact Green Line Rates today.