Billing Software 1

[Noway2]

This is probably a bit of a stretch, given that it's a pretty niche area, but I thought I would ask and maybe find that someone does have a suggestion.

I work as an Engineer for a university in their energy services division that provides several utility services to campus, including steam and electricity (cogeneration), chilled water, water, sewer, natural gas, etc. Some of these are metered and billed and some are pass through from the upstream provider.

Since about 2005 we've been using a product called Oracle Utilities to manage the monthly billing process. The product is end of life and we're looking for a replacement. I I have been looking on line and talked to other universities and the same names keep popping up, but I would like to try to expand my search. Specifically I am curious about what system(s) any municipalities may be using.

Does anyone have any experience in this field and could you offer any suggestions?

 

[EnergyProfessional]

I work for a municipality. We don't have steam etc. And get direct accounts through the utility like any other user would. We just happen to have many accounts.

We use a software called EnergyCAP. I don't really use it, but I know we hired a consultant who imports the monthly data for all the hundreds of accounts. I'm not sure if that is due to a weird way the 2 utilities we have do their billing, or if it is because of the the software. I don't know if it really is necessary to hire a consultant, but you should find out what maintenance and data entry requirements you have and what that may cost you.

 

[Noway2]

Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it. EnergyCAP is one of the ones that has been floating to the top of the list. It is good to see another recommendation for it from a different perspective than a university peer.

Import of the monthly data seems to be one of the common troubles with most of the utility billing software packages. I think EnergyCAP also has a service that does an OCR scan of the bill and then uploads them, but it was semi pricey per page. We currently have a person who spends about two weeks out of the month doing billing maintenance and this is one of the functions.

From what I have been able to determine so far, it supports all of the input types we currently process, but then most information is a unit of consumption, possibly a demand multiplier (electric) and this gets multiplied against a rate.