Sustainability & Risk / Energy / Background Data - Utilities

Defining Building Groups for Proration

You might receive some energy bills that are for a groups of buildings that a vendor bills together in one bill. To enter these bills into the system, you use the Define Building Groups for Proration task to define the group of buildings that are billed together. You can then enter bills for the group using the Enter Bills for Building Groups task. When you add these bills, the system creates prorated bills for each building using the proration action you specify when defining the group.

Getting Started

Before adding a building group for proration, you define vendor accounts. Vendor accounts are associated with a site and building. A proration group includes the buildings for a site that receive a common bill, so these buildings must all be associated with the same site and vendor account. See Define Vendors and their accounts.

Prorating bills assigned to a group of buildings

When you prorate a bill assigned to a group of buildings, the individual bills that are generated each have the Reference Bill Code (reference_bill_id ) field for the original bill. The Prorated / Aggregated? field for the generated bills is set to PRORATED-LOCATION to indicate that the proration occurred based on belonging to a proration group.

Report Calculation

The application uses the Prorated / Aggregated field to ensure that records are not double-counted in reports.

Existing application reports use the following records in their calculations:

• The records that didn’t need to be prorated by location.
• The final records generated by proration

When a record is prorated, all the original bill records are excluded from all report calculations.

Procedure: Defining building groups for proration

To define building proration group

1. Select the Energy / Background Data - Utilities / Define Building Groups for Proration task.

   The Define Building Groups for Proration form appears. The Building Proration Groups / Vendor Accounts list shows the vendor accounts you have defined using the Define Vendor Accounts task. If the vendor account has already been defined as a building proration group, it has a Proration Group Name, and the Proration Action is a value other than None.

2. Click the vendor account in the list that you want to define as a proration group.

   The Add / Edit Building Proration Groups form shows information for the group.

3. Add the Proration Action, Select the method of proration from the Proration Action list. When you select a proration action , the Assigned Buildings and Available Buildings panes appear.

   Note: You must change the Proration Action from None before you can assign buildings to the group.

   Proration Action. This selection specifies how the application prorates the bill amounts between the group of buildings when you enter a bill for this group. The following describes the possible values you can specify for how the proration occurs:

   • Manual. The bill is prorated using the amount you enter for each building.
   • Building Occupancy. The bill is prorated proportionately to the building's occupancy based on the bl.count_occup field for each building.
   • Building Area. The bill is prorated proportionately to the buildings based on the value for the bl.area_usable field for each building.
   • Percentage: The bill is prorated using the percentage you manually enter for each building.
4. Add the Proration Group Name. This is the descriptive name for the group of buildings that are billed together by this vendor. Users will select this name when entering bills.
5. Save your entries. Click Save in the Add /Edit Buildings Proration Group form to save the information entered here.
6. Add Buildings. The Available Buildings pane shows the buildings for the site associated with the vendor account or proration group you selected at the start.  All buildings added to a proration group must belong to the same vendor account.
   1. From the Available Buildings pane, select the check boxes for the buildings that you want to include in the group. These are the buildings that the vendor includes on one bill.
   2. Click Assign.
      The buildings appear in the Assigned Buildings pane.

Editing a proration group name or action

To edit a proration group:

1. Select the Define Proration Groups task.
2. Click a proration group in the Building Proration Groups / Vendor Accounts list. You can distinguish vendor accounts that are also proration groups because they have a value for the Proration Group Name and a Proration Action other than None.
   The Add / Edit Proration Group pane shows details for the selected group.
3. From the Add / Edit form, you can edit the Group Name and the Proration Action if needed.

   Note: If you change the Proration Action to None, and there are already buildings added to this proration group, when you save the record, you are asked if you want to delete the buildings from the group. To proceed, select Yes

4. Click Save.