When creating an Energy Use Profile, why am I seeing discrepancies between what my customer's utility bill says, and what ETB is calculating?
Accuracy and precision are important to us, especially when it comes to recreating a utility bill. There are a few common explanations for discrepancies between what your utility bills say and what ETB calculates:
Correctly defining rate schedule, sub-attributes: most of the rate schedules listed in our tariff library have several sub-attributes, like voltage type, service type, baseline territory, etc. These sub-attributes are specific to each utility rate schedule and, in some cases, can make a meaningful difference in bill calculation. The user needs to ensure they correctly define these sub-attributes to precisely recreate their customer’s utility bill.
Effective date (tariff): ETB calculates the utility bill based on the 'effective date' tariff the user specifies (the most recent ‘effective date’ is the default). Whereas older utility bills are often based on older ‘effective date’ tariffs.
Date ranges: when attempting to tie-out monthly utility bills, often times the billing date ranges don’t line up exactly. This can lead to monthly discrepancies in both the energy and demand charge sections. Users can adjust the billing start and end date in the Energy Use Profile to match the utility bill, to get a more precise monthly tie-out.
Customer-specific charges, like taxes and riders: some customers have unique utility/city/county tax rates that are specific to their account. In our new release, a user can custom define a customer’s utility tax rate, expressed either on a percentage or $/kWh basis – when creating their Energy Use Profile. In an upcoming release, a user can also custom create a utility rate schedule to precisely account for riders or direct access (custom supply) charges.
Bundled and unbundled rates: many utilities offer both bundled and unbundled service options. With bundled rates, a customer receives delivery (also known as distribution and transmission) and supply (also known as generation) from the utility company and typically receives a single utility bill with all of their charges. With unbundled rates, a customer will typically receive delivery charges from their local utility and supply charges from a third-party energy service company. A customer may receive two bills in these cases, one from their utility company and a second from their energy service company. If you find that your bills are not adding up correctly, you may have a customer with an unbundled service. In these cases, you need to create a custom utility rate that accounts for all charges from both the utility and the third party energy service company.
An error in our rate database: we are human and make mistakes. We do validation when we enter in new rate schedules in our system, but it is certainly possible we mis-entered something on our end. If you see a discrepancy and think it’s our fault, please let us know ASAP.