ABSTRACTToday’s utility bill tracking software can deliver excellent results for energy managers who want to gain a comprehensive understanding of utility usage and costs in their facilities. All of the major commercially available utility bill tracking software programs are good at what they do, however, they are distinctly different in functionality and capacity.
Savvy energy managers have discovered – sometimes the hard way – the importance of selecting the appropriate software package to meet their needs. Before reviewing software packages, it is best to understand the needs of your organization and the resources available. Then you can compare each program’s capabilities (such as budgeting and forecasting, temperature correction, rate analysis, report generation, etc.) against your needs.
Making the wrong choice can result in wasted time and hours of frustration, or worse – dissatisfied clients or management.
This paper will help you to identify what tasks you want to accomplish with your utility bill tracking software.
WHY NOT JUST USE SPREADSHEETS?If you are tracking energy usage and costs for a handful of meters, a spreadsheet may be adequate; however, if you are tracking for a large organization with many facilities, or tracking savings from energy efficiency measures, then commercial energy accounting software may be the best and easiest way to track your utilities.
INTRODUCTION TO UTILITY BILL TRACKING SOFTWAREAll the major utility bill tracking software packages are good at what they do. However, they are all different and have different capabilities. Although you can track your utility bills effectively in any of the software packages, depending upon what your specific needs are, there is likely a program that is more suited to your needs than the others. Choosing the correct software package the first time can save you hours of work, and help you avoid the frustration of discovering too late that it does not produce what you wanted.
NARROWING DOWN THE SCOPE OF OUR ANALYSISIn order to narrow down the scope of this presentation, we have made two rough classifications, which are detailed below. This paper covers desktop (not web-based) utility bill (not interval data) software programs.
Web vs. Desktop ApplicationsUsing the web to track your energy usage is useful for large organizations. Large companies dispersed around the globe can enter their utility usage, and see reports comparing the usage in Lubbock to the usage in London. Central energy managers can then easily allocate energy costs across the enterprise and locate high usage facilities and concentrate efforts there. However, enterprise web applications are usually relatively expensive and often offer only basic analysis functionality. There are a great number of web applications available, most of which focus on interval (e.g. 15-minute) data.
There are also some internet bill tracking services that are relatively inexpensive. These applications will present your data to you on the web in a number of ways, but at present appear to be limited in analytical capacity and functionality. For example, these web services typically will not weather normalize utility data, which results in faulty year over year comparisons of utility bills.  These web services are not addressed in this paper.
There are only a handful of utility bill software programs in the desktop market. Desktop applications usually offer more sophisticated analysis than their web brethren, and usually at a much-reduced price compared to web software. Many desktop packages offer some interface to the internet, such as downloading bill, interval or weather data, and creating html reports.
Interval Data vs. Utility BillsAlthough there is considerable value to be found in analysis of interval data, there do not appear to be enough interval data experts to go around. Some organizations have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for interval data enterprise software, only to have it go unused, often due to lack of trained and available staff that can gain meaningful information from it.
Interval data can be used for several purposes, some of which are listed below:
-    Determining when equipment is turned on and off-    Discovering and diagnosing equipment and controls problems, -    Load shedding, -    Aggregating energy usage across an enterprise into load profiles which can be used when procuring energy supply contracts, -    Applying rates to the interval data to get a better understanding of the hourly cost of running the facility.
Viewing utility bills in monthly (or billing) increments is a simpler discipline which is more comprehensible to management, more familiar to energy professionals, and more commonly practiced. Plenty of useful information about a facility can be gleaned from utility bills, some of which are listed below:
-    Determining whether the facility is saving energy and utility costs-    Identifying the most wasteful facilities-    Identifying controls and equipment problems-    Budgeting and Forecasting-    Understanding where utility costs are going-    Performing rate analysis-    Verifying that the utilities are billing correctly-    Identifying changes in facility usage patterns
As the topic of this paper is Utility Bill Tracking, we will not cover interval data analysis here, however it is important to note that some desktop packages can handle both your utility bill and interval data, and can reconcile your utility bills with interval data.
SOFTWARE SELECTION CRITERIAPerhaps the best method of determining the software program for your specific needs and budget is to clarify what you would want to use the software to accomplish. Below we have listed some of the tasks that utility bill tracking software can help you perform.
There is a comprehensive questionnaire at the end of this paper which will help optimize your software criteria.
-    Are you more interested in utility accounting or energy analysis and saving energy?-    Do you need to identify the most inefficient facilities?-    Do you need to measure energy savings from your energy conservation projects or from performance contracts?-    Do you need to streamline your utility bill payment system?-    Do you need to create an incentive system to encourage employees to save energy?-    Do you need to verify that your utility bills are correct?-    Do you need to allocate costs from master meters to submeters and subsidiary accounts?-    Do you need to identify anomalous changes in utility usage?-    Do you need to understand the relationship between production at your factory (or occupancy at your hotel, etc.) and utility usage?-    Do you need to create budgets and track your utility costs against the budgeted costs?-    Do you need to evaluate different rate structures on your utility data to find the best rate?
Once you have determined your specific needs and budget, you can identify which software features are necessary accomplish these tasks. This section lists features and selection criteria with which you can sift through the software programs to find the one best suited to your needs.
Capacity: How Large A Project Will You Be Working With?The software packages currently available represent a wide range of capacity – from a low end of several hundred meters to a high end of nearly unlimited accounts. If you are putting together a utility bill tracking project with thousands of meters, then the smaller software packages may not be applicable. Some of the desktop packages have SQL databases that can handle virtually an unlimited number of accounts. Some energy managers get around the database size limitations of the smaller desktop packages by keeping several databases, each corresponding to a different section of the organization. If you are responsible for hundreds or thousands of meters, you might find that it is not necessary to track all of your meters. Tracking fire protection and street lighting meters may not result in any analytic value at all.
Energy Accounting Method: Year to Year Comparison vs. Temperature CorrectionThere are different ways to view your utility data. You can compare your usage from year to year to see if you are using more or less energy, or you can correct your energy usage for weather data, or other factors, such as occupancy or production.
If you compare utility usage from year to year, you can quantify the change in usage and costs. However, you cannot tell if the change is due to fluctuations in weather, changes in rate, changes to the facility itself (such as new additions, new equipment, or extra shifts), or due to reduction or increase in energy usage (which is what you are trying to determine). Energy analysts often prefer to normalize their data to weather, so that they remove these factors, and get a truer picture as to whether the facility is using more or less energy than it used to. Without weather normalization, they may not be able to tell if their project is truly saving energy, or instead, if the change in weather from year to year is responsible for changes in utility usage.  This same type of normalization can be done with other factors as well, such as production, occupancy or calendar.  
Be aware as well, not all weather normalization is the same.  Some software packages will have extensive normalization capacity, which allows energy analysts to extract the maximum from their utility bills, whereas other programs offer very little in reporting or analysis along this line, treating normalization as an afterthought.
Ease of Use Most of the programs are relatively [...]