Receiving Bills Electronically

Receiving Bills Electronically
©2013 EnergyCAP, Inc. @energycap #energyleader www.EnergyCAP.com
Steve Heinz, PE, CEM
Founder & CEO
EnergyCAP, Inc.

Presented by EnergyCAP, Inc.
EnergyCAP is used by organizations that receive many utility bills for
bill processing, energy reporting and analytics
Over 30 years as industry leader; first release in 1982. (The
predecessor software was FASER Energy Accounting).
Web-based and on-premise versions.
Financially secure. No debt. No VC funds.
EnergyCAP software is all we do—we don’t sell hardware, retrofits,
consulting, bill payment outsourcing, procurement.

1,500 organizations use EnergyCAP.
City Government (San Francisco, Baltimore, Sacramento,
Virginia Beach, Tampa, Denver, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City,
Cleveland)
County Government (Orange, Riverside, Santa Barbara CA;
Loudoun, Fairfax, Chesterfield VA; Miami Dade, Charlotte FL)
Federal (USMC, Smithsonian, U.S. Dept of Energy Labs)
Commercial (Ryder, Equity Residential, Forest City, BJs
Wholesale Clubs, CBRE, Northrop Grumman)
Education (800+ school districts, SUNY system, Univ of CA
system, UCF, Univ of Kansas)

Are Electronic Bills Right for Me?
Pros:
Free from keying errors
Complete details/line items
Sounds cheaper than keying

Are Electronic Bills Right for Me?
Cons:
Setup and management
Specialized software/VAN
No longer receive a hard copy bill
High skill level
May not be cheaper, all costs considered

Electronic Is Best When:
You have relatively few vendors and all facilities in
one region
Many invoices from a vendor (at least hundreds
a month)
Vendor has support resources available and
actively promotes electronic bills

EDI or Non-EDI
EDI: Electronic Data Interchange
Non-EDI: Everything else

Non-EDI Options
Web scraping
PDF downloads from website, or direct delivery of
PDFs
OCR from paper bills
Non-EDI data file (CSV, XML)
Outsource and import results
Non-EDI

Process: Obtain the data electronically, convert to
EnergyCAP import format, map data fields and import
Non-EDI

Web scraping
Vendor posts complete (enough) bill data on website
Web scraping tools allow automatic login and
download
Non-EDI

Web scraping
Pros:
No per-bill fee
Web scraping tools are quite powerful and easy to
use
Think of Intuit’s Mint.com
Non-EDI

Web scraping
Cons:
Vendor website changes break the web scraping
mapping
Complete bill details may not be available
Non-EDI

PDF downloads
Native PDF has “raw data” within it, allowing
accurate import
Scanned PDF requires OCR
Non-EDI

PDF downloads
Pros:
No per-bill fee
You get a bill image
Non-EDI

PDF downloads
Cons:
Requires a process to interpret the data, whether
“native” or “scanned”
Non-EDI

Can be quite accurate and time-saving
Requires mapping of each bill format
Non-EDI

Pros:
No per-bill fee
Non-EDI

Cons:
Requires OCR software and mapping
Mapping is affected by bill format changes
Non-EDI

Non-EDI files
CSV, XML, spreadsheet, etc
Usually used for post-pay (historical) data, not
live bills
Non-EDI

Non-EDI files
Pros:
No per-bill fee (generally)
Non-EDI

Non-EDI files
Cons:
No paper bill or image
Requires software to interpret the data files
Non-EDI

Outsource, then import results
Outsource live bill processing to a trusted bill
processor (we recommend Cass)
Cass file is converted to EnergyCAP import format
for accurate bill import.
Non-EDI

Pros:
Accurate
Hassle-free
Optional bill payment service
Non-EDI

Cons:
Incurs a per-bill fee forever
Non-EDI

EDI

You start with a raw EDI 810 electronic utility bill:
EDI

You end up
with a data-
rich, 100%
accurate bill in
EnergyCAP:
EDI

Developed by NIST (National Institute of Standards and
Technology (a Dept of Commerce agency)
ANSI X12 is the parent standard
EDI 810 is the specific standard for utility bill invoices
Utility Industry Group (UIG) maintains the standard
It is loose! All Utilities are not the same!
Not offered by all Utilities
EDI

Typical EDI process requirements:
“997” is the acknowledgement of receipt of bills
“VAN” is the value-added network, the intermediary
between trading partners
“820” is the remittance advice file
Electronic payments are usually required
No more paper bills
No, or very short, period of parallel paper and
EDI billing
EDI

Typical work flow
EDI

EDI decision logic
EDI

Option–Outsource the EDI processing to
a middleman
The service provider receives the EDI bills
Sends 997 acknowledgement to the vendor
Prepares the data in EnergyCAP import format
Transmits the import files and pseudo-images of bills
Our preferred
middleman is Xebec
(www.XebecData.com)
EDI

Thank you for attending our webinar series!
See them all at:
http://www.energycap.com/products/energycap
-enterprise-learn-more/schedule-a-live-demo

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