Cost of Invoice Processing - Utilities
Do you know the true cost of invoice processing?
Gartner the global research and analysis group estimate typically the cost of processing an invoice in the UK ranges from £4 to £25, and in some cases is as high as £50 per individual invoice.
This is just the standard process of collecting the invoice, logging it onto any systems you may use and paying it to you supplier. This doesn’t take into consideration any of the further costs you may incur if there are billing inaccuracies or supplier disputes.
Cost of Invoice Processing – Billing Accuracy
With an estimated 1 in 5 business utility invoices being incorrect is your accounts department or business checking for such errors before the invoice is processed? If so how much extra does this add to the cost of processing your utility invoices? If not, how much of an impact is this going to add further down the line apart from the cost to fix the problem?
Example cost of processing utility invoices
Lets look at a simple example of the cost of successfully processing utility invoices using a conservative figure of £12.50 per invoice based on Gartner saying it could be as much as £50 per invoice (so 25%).
Also lets say your business is responsible for 4 meters which are billed monthly and use the estimated industry average of 1 in 5 invoices having a billing error;
Cost of processing utility invoices
Additional cost of rectifying utility billing issues
Total annual cost of processing and rectifying utility invoices
So that’s an average cost of processing a utility invoice of £28.50 per month using respected figures from Gartner at conservative values.
What value are you getting beyond processing your utility invoices?
So once you have processed your invoices, what value are you getting beyond your finance system reports showing expenditure?
- Is your business getting to carbon neutral by a certain date on the agenda?
- Do you have more than 250 employees or are a publicly listed business which now must do an annual SECR report?
- Are you looking to reduce consumption with energy saving initiatives or become more sustainable with onsite energy generation projects?
- Do you spend further time putting together utility annual budgets and do these include any consideration to the utility market costs or are they just a financial estimate based on bill spend?
- Are you looking at ways to automate or increase efficiency within your finance team?
- Do you have cloud systems for processing, analysing and reporting your utility costs and performance?
All the above equals further substantial costs on top of your utility invoice processing.
Digitalise your energy spend management with EaaSi
For less then 25% of the estimated cost of processing your utility invoices (estimated £256.50 per invoice per annum saving), our cloud based energy spend management platform EaaSi can automatically collect your PDF utility invoices, validate them against your current utility contract and pass them through to your accounts system without any human interaction.
Our platform uses something called robotic process automation (RPA) which you may already be starting to deploy across your business to increase efficiency, reduce costs and guarantee better data accuracy.
Huge return on investment with market leading benefits
Once our platform is set up, you can access all your utility supply invoices in one cloud portal should anyone need to reference them. We also bring into the system any meter consumption data which is available so we can not only check your usage against you invoices, but share your consumption with any employee of your business who needs it to complete any projects or reviews.
Also included as part of the monthly subscription fee is;
- Carbon (Greenhouse Gas) reporting
- SECR reporting data
- All your utility invoices (supplier agnostic)
- Budgets and accruals using utility market data against your consumption profiles
- Tracking energy efficiency projects and ROI’s
- Multi Site Energy Management
- All your contracts in one place
- Large suite of reporting across consumption and financials
- Digital energy procurement (multi-site businesses)
Own your utility data and save potentially 100% on your utility invoice processing costs
Did you know you could have a separate contract for your utility meter maintenance and the data that is collected from them?
There is an industry set margin in these contracts which your supplier is keeping for themselves without passing on much benefit.
By moving these costs out of your next utility contract and onto your own agreement with us at no extra cost to you (the utility provider exclude these costs on your next contract quote) then we could supply you with our EaaSi energy spend management platform free of charge.
Finally, our platform is supplier agnostic so we can run alongside and compliment any existing utility contract you have in place.
Contact us now to understand how we can digitalise your utility invoice processing with huge benefits and cost savings.
About Catalyst Commercial Services
Catalyst is a market leading independent energy consultancy that provides energy procurement, sustainability and environmental services. Catalyst is one of the leading providers of utility purchasing and contract negotiation services to the commercial sector. With over 15 years’ experience in this dynamic market, the team of energy market professionals provide a full options appraisal for business utility contract needs.
