Today'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. The entire major commercially available utility bill tracking software programs is 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.
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 software - all 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 analysis - in order to narrow down the scope of this presentation, we have made two rough classifications, which are detailed below. They are the desktop (not web-based) utility bill (not interval data) software programs.
There are also some internet bills 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.
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About the Author:
Cheryl L. True is a Manila-based freelance writer who writes on a variety of topics.
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