Sustainability & Risk/ Energy / Accounting Supervisor

Utility Bill Discrepancy Alert

Note: This same alert appears on the home page and on the Review and Approve Bills form, so that you are aware of the discrepancy before approving the bill.

You can compare the consumption and demand values that appear on your monthly bill with the measured consumption and demand values recorded by your own electrical meter. You are alerted to any discrepancies between the billed values and the measured values by the Utility Bill Discrepancy alert in the Alerts bucket on the homepage. Clicking on the alert brings you to the Review and Approve Bills view, which gives more detail as to which bill contains the discrepancy and by what amount.

The Utility Bill Discrepancy metric is a count of bills which shows a discrepancy in billed vs measured values indicating over or under-billing. The application displays an alert for consumption or demand value discrepancies between 5-15% (yellow) or exceeding 15% (red).

For each bill, a discrepancy might be found for billed consumption, or billed demand.

For the discrepancy detection for each bill pending approval, Archibus compares each Consumption or Demand Bill Line with its Measured Value:

• Billed Consumption is indicated by bill lines with Rollup Type ‘Energy’ (electric or gas consumption) or ‘Volume’ (water consumption).
• Billed Demand is indicated by bill lines with Rollup Type ‘Power’ (demand).
• Measured Consumption is the sum of all measured consumption values for all data point associated with the bill line for the month billed and according to the rate structure defined for the bill line.
• Measured Demand is the maximum demand value for all data points associated with the bill line for the month billed and according to the rate structure defined for the bill line.

You can drill into the metric to review bills with discrepancies before authorizing approval. Discrepancies between the consumption reported on your bill and the amount measured by your meter for that month may reveal a faulty meter, an inaccurate reading by the utility vendor, or an error in the way your bill is being calculated.

The alert calculation requires that a Data Point, or meter, is in place to take readings which correlate to the Vendor Account Code, and that these readings have been entered / imported for the billed month and processed using the Process BAS Data view in Energy.

For the additional comparison by bill line, the calculation requires that a meter is linked to both the Vendor Account Code and Vendor Meter ID recorded for the bill line.

See Defining Meters and Processing Meter Data.

Alert Logic

The following describes the alert logic:

• The alert logic looks for bills with the Bill Status "Pending Approval"

• Checks for bill total discrepancy in either Consumption or Demand

• Checks for bill line discrepancy in either Consumption or Demand

• If the bill total or any individual bill line contains a >5% discrepancy, the application creates only one alert for the greatest discrepancy calculated

• The application displays the alert text, along with the count of discrepancies and max percentage discrepancy calculated, such as
  • [2] Utility Bill Discrepancy: +15%
  • The alerts are color-coded as follows:

Note: These thresholds are configurable via the Metric Definition for the metric env_UtilityBillDiscrepancy_daily.

• Red : Discrepancies over ±15%
• Yellow: Discrepancies between ± 5-15%