Sustainability & Risk / Energy / Cost Administrator

Cost Administrator: Overview

As the Cost Administrator, you can:

1. Define Vendors and Vendor Accounts if they have not already been defined. See Define Vendors and their Accounts.
2. Enter bills and line items that are central to the Energy application. See Enter Bills and Line Items.
3. Enter a bill for a group of buildings. If you define proration groups for buildings that your vendor bills together, the application can prorate these bills using the method you define for the group. See Enter Bills for a Group of Buildings.
4. Load bills. You can automatically load your bill data into Archibus using the Archibus Connectors by running the Load Bills task. See Loading Bills.

The Energy application enables the Cost Administrator to enter bills that are then approved by the Accounting Supervisor. See Energy Bill Entry / Approval Process.

Options for entering bill data

The Energy application offers several options for entering your bill data:

• Use the Connectors. You can use the Archibus Connectors to load data from your enterprise systems into the application. See Energy Application On-Ramp:  Using the Connectors - Overview.
• Manual Entry. A cost administrator or accounting supervisor can enter bills using the guidelines for bill entry that require bills to be entered only for complete months with no gaps in sequence. This ensures that you can both approve and archive bills and run the weather model analysis. See Enter Bills, Line Items and Vendor Accounts, and Send Bills for Approval
• Enter bills for a group of buildings, If you receive bills for more than one building, you can define proration groups for these buildings and have the application prorate the bills using the method you specify. See Entering Bills for Groups of Buildings.

Exempting bill types from data entry guidelines

A business process owner can exempt bill types from the strict data entry requirement, so that you can approve and archive the bills, even though they are not entered for complete months and not in a strict sequence. This is useful for bills, such as fuel oil, that are often delivered on an as-needed basis. See Configuring Bill Processing.

If your business process owner exempts a bill type from this data entry check, you are able to generate the analytic reports for these bill types as you can approve and archive them. However, you are not able to generate the Usage with Weather Model report unless you also use the Bill Processing Exceptions report. From the Bill Processing Exceptions report, you can review the bills that do not meet the data entry requirements, and can take actions so that the application generates bills that the weather model can use. See Bill Processing Exceptions.

Options for entering bills when using the weather model analysis

The format required for entering bill data depends on whether or not you want to run the weather model analysis. If you want to run the weather model analysis, your bill data must meet the strict guidelines for entering bills for complete months with no gaps in time periods. However, you have the following options to achieve this:

• Enter the bills using the guidelines; that is, enter them for complete months with no gaps in time period. See Guidelines for entering bill data. You are able to generate all analytic reports including the Usage with Weather Model .
• If you have exempted a bill type from the data entry requirements for approval and archiving, you can use the Bill Processing Exceptions Report to have the application generate bills that the weather model can use. See Bill Processing Exceptions Report.
• If you need to run the weather model for only certain bill types, you can follow the guidelines for entering bill data for only those bill types. For the other bill types, you can configure bill processing so that bills of that type do not need to follow this strict data entry process in order to be approved and archived. For these bill types, you can generate all reports except the Usage with Weather Model.