Energy Spend Management - Digital transformation needed

However, there is one area that continues to lag behind in embracing digital technologies – energy spend management – the way we procure, validate and forecast our business energy and utilities costs:

• The UK’s industrial and commercial businesses consume around 185TWh of power each year, equating to £27bn at 14.5p/kWh.
• Added to this, the built environment is estimated to spend £19.8bn on IoT technologies to aid business process efficiency as well as manage energy consumption and reduce utility bills.
• The way the bills are processed, validated, budgeted for and forecast can be archaic due to its manual process.

With such a high portion of a business overheads being spent on utilities or solutions to reduce energy consumption costs, why are they still using systems and processes that are manual, time intensive and often incorrect?

Manual processes all impact on cash flow; cash flow and liquidity are some of the top priorities for businesses during the pandemic. This is a compelling case and stresses that the management of energy costs is now more pressing than ever:

• Missing and inaccurate bills as well as incorrect data entry is the main reason over 1.2m businesses in the UK are owed money back from suppliers for bills paid some going back up to six years.
• Finance teams need accurate information instantly on energy consumption and costs to be able to budget for now and for the future. They also need to know that what they are paying to the utility providers is correct and that any previous overpayment can be recouped back.
• Over paid bills is cash out of the business in times that it’s needed or on the flip side, underpaid bills is money that needs to be found when a business’ cash flow is currently tight.

It’s time to eradicate the issues businesses experience in energy spend management and start to automate – say good bye to the costly manual processes. It’s time for a step change and go digital to better manage, budget and forecast energy spend.

Businesses can easily stop wasting time, money and ‘energy’ and embrace the benefits digital technologies like EaaSi, which can:

• Automatically pull together end-to-end utility data into a single place, removing the need for human intervention and massively reducing resource requirements for contract management. A HUGE win for business.
• Interface with accounting packages such as SAP, Sage and major ERP systems, providing finance departments with immediate visibility on energy spend, billing cycles and fully automated, wholly transparent bill validation. Another WIN for business.
• Create a digital filing cabinet for all utility data and contract information. It links into supplier’s systems, automatically requests bills and uses machine learning to fill in any gaps.
• Offer fully automated bill validation using 120 different checks to ensure bill accuracy against consumption and contractual rates, with any anomalies flagged via an alerts system.
• Enable accurate budget forecasts, visibility on accruals, bench-marking against market rates for flexible contracts, and simplifies procurement for both end users and suppliers.
• Deliver energy and carbon reporting at the touch of a button, drastically reducing administrative burdens.

Find out more at EaaSi.co.uk contact info@catalyst-commercial.co.uk to arrange a free demo.