What Is Summary Billing?

Today, we’re going to talk about summary billing, also known as consolidated billing.

Certain organizations can have hundreds, or even thousands, of accounts with a single utility. Paying an individual bill for each account requires Herculean effort that must be repeated on a monthly basis. At scale, this process is prone to late fees and service disconnections.

Summary billing was invented by utilities to help these customers. A summary bill is an invoice that combines many accounts onto a single document, enabling a single payment each month. This helps keep the lights on and keep costs down.

However, while summary billing simplifies the life of an Accounts Payable division, it’s not necessarily best for everyone. Often times, summary billing makes energy management more difficult. Valuable information is lost when many accounts are lumped into a single group. By tracking the Amount Due and total usage of a summary bill instead of each individual account, many important details are needlessly thrown away.

Fortunately, an automated data platform can provide the best of both worlds. Urjanet’s platform is custom-built to handle consolidated billing. It takes one monolithic document, created for bill payment, and breaks it back down to its most granular parts. A platform adapted to summary billing can:

• Identify unique sub-accounts
• Identify meters
• Give line item-level cost information
• Give line item-level consumption information
• Maintain the overall relational structure of the invoice
• Enable detailed analysis across many providers
• Enable easy reporting

And that is summary billing in a nutshell.

If you have thoughts to share on utility billing at your organization, we’d love to hear from you on Twitter. And to learn more about how Urjanet’s Utility Data Platform empowers energy management programs, check out our Solutions Sheet: Utility Data for Energy Management & Procurement.

Related Resources:

• The Past, Present, and Future of eBilling
• The Value of Improving Your Utility Bill Management: Insights and Best Practices
• What Is Dual Billing?

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