Utility Bill Management and Cost Recovery

Utility Bill Management and Cost Recovery

Only pay for the energy your organisation has consumed at the rates agreed with your utility suppliers.

Utility Billing and Cost Recovery

The turbulent nature of the energy market has led to extremely volatile and exponential increases in your cost of energy. It is vital that you make sure that your energy bills are based on accurate consumption, the agreed unit rates from the energy procurement stage, and that billing errors are identified and corrected. You would imagine that every bill issued by your utility supplier is correct, however, that is simply not the case, with our analysis showing that between 3% – 4% of utility bills have errors.

Bill validation acts as an insurance policy to ensure that what your utility supplier bills you and asks you to pay is what you should be paying. The Sigma Utility Billing and Cost Recovery model will ensure that you are only paying for the consumption your organisation has actually consumed at the rates agreed with your utility suppliers.

Our specialist Bill Validation solution carries out more than 100 validator checks on your utility invoice data, finding data anomalies so you don’t have to. The specialist functionality will alleviate resource pressure, saving you both time and money, as well as providing optimised cost assurance and recovery opportunities.

All individual bill charges are validated and captured according to the relevant contract and tariff configuration, meaning a full breakdown of the charge elements on a bill is available for MI reporting.

Get complete business revenue assurance and utility management with Sigma’s advanced bill validation capability. This includes:

  • Electricity, Gas, Water utility supplies
  • Complete Bill Element Validation (including DUoS and TNUoS passthrough)
  • Automated Bulk Bill Import EDI, CSV, Manual Bill Entry
  • Management Information (MI) and Dashboards

Uploading utility invoices in bulk is made easier with Sigma’s EDI tools. Automated utility bill validation removes manual intervention and ensures that only valid bills are paid.

Sigma’s cost recovery query management functions eliminate the labour intensive process of managing supplier invoice queries, allowing you to use valuable resource time elsewhere.

The benefits of Sigma’s bill management functionality:

  • Rapid processing of large quantities of any EDI utility bills to save admin time on loading invoices manually
  • Process EDI bills for multiple sites, aggregating vast amounts of data in one place
  • Ensures only valid bills are paid giving you revenue assurance and highlighting potential cost recoveries
  • Detailed billing information can be captured to provide superior reporting
  • Frees up resources required for bill processing, meaning resources can be used elsewhere in the business
  • Bespoke validation criteria allow you to tailor billing checks in line with your energy management strategy
  • Real cost savings made through bill checking and validation
  • Increased level of visibility, accessibility, and depth of data; providing better insights for business planning
  • Improves accuracy by eliminating manual data entry errors, providing better quality data
  • Promotion of a paperless environment, supporting your overall sustainability

Network charge bill validation

Sigma simplifies the validation process for Distribution (DUoS) and Transmission (TNUoS) pass through charges with its Network Charge Bill Validation tool, providing complete revenue assurance for what can now account for up to 25% of your total electricity bill.

Accruals

Sigma’s accrual capability provides assurance that all your utility liabilities are accounted for, even if the relevant supplier bills have not been received. Accruals will be in the context of both cost and consumption and can be interfaced with your downstream finance system for seamless integration to enable complete and accurate financial, budgeting, forecasting and stakeholders reporting activities.

Sigma will identify gaps in contiguous utility billing, specifically, utility invoices that are expected to be received but have not yet been billed by the relevant supplier(s).

Bill Query Management

Sigma’s Query Management features provide a robust and traceable way to manage any exceptions that are found during the validation of utility bills.

Billing issues identified during the bill processing stage can be fed into the Query Management module, creating workable ‘cases’ with key information such as the category, value, likelihood of success and owner. These cases can be tracked and used to inform suppliers of anomalies.

The bill validation and bill query capabilities are supported by a suite of pre-defined reports and dashboards. This will support your utility supplier performance management and enable you to visualise the recovery success of your bill validation process and the performance of your utilities suppliers, in terms of resolving reported billing errors and the quality of your supplier’s billing services, error rates and trends. Analysis by billing error category will support you in driving supplier billing performance improvements.

Bill Charge Line Reporting

Capture all individual charges on a bill according to the relevant contract and tariff configuration so you can access a detailed breakdown of the charge elements to feed into your Management Information reporting and through validation.

Premise Level Billing

Manage and view bill data at MPAN level with Sigma’s Premise Level Billing feature.

Premise level billing is where a single invoice can contain charges for one or more MPANs/MPRNs. This can be the case where there is more than one Meter at a given site. Typically, the invoice will contain a breakdown of charges at the MPAN/MPRN level even though there is only one top-level invoice with the total liability. Sigma enables you to manage this data much more efficiently.

Contact us

Call us on 01908 690018 to speak to a member of the team and learn more about how Sigma can help you

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