👍 This article will help you:
Create a dashboard to track utility bill costs for a building
Perform advanced period and data adjustments to improve accuracy
Incorporate baselines to predict future months' bill costs
If you work with utility bills, then you know the time- and labor-intensive process involved in managing and tracking costs and usage. Often, teams managing utility bills must prioritize manual data entry instead of investing in energy conservation projects and maintenance.
To make analysis of bill costs easier, Atrius has tools to simplify the creation of monthly and yearly cost reports. When used together, these tools give you a time-saving advantage and dramatically increase the accuracy of your reports.
Create a dashboard of bill costs
If you have bill points, then you're ready to begin creating a dashboard of your buildings' bill point costs or consumption. Follow these steps to get started:
Go to Dashboards on the left side menu.
Select 'Add a dashboard' at the top right of the Dashboards page.
Select the 'Add a card' button. Select one of the following card types from the menu: Trends, Year-over-Year Trends, or Comparisons.
In the card configuration form, for your desired building(s), make the following selections:
Field | Instructions |
Data type | Select 'Bills'. |
Point type | Select a point type or resource, or 'Total energy'. For Building Trends card, you may also select 'All point types'. |
Point | For Building Trends or Building Year-over-Year cards, if you selected a single resource, then select the bill point you wish to graph. |
Metric | Select the metric, such as cost or consumption. For applicable bill points, you may select an available bill itemization. |
Make further field selections as needed, such as Chart type, Unit, Currency, and Period. Select 'Save'. Now that you have made a card, consider creating additional cards for other point types, metrics, or periods in the same dashboard.
Above: Portfolio Year-over-Year Trends card displaying total energy cost for all buildings over the last 4 years.
Improve the accuracy of your bill costs
Once you have a dashboard of your buildings' bill point costs or consumption, you can perform advanced period and data adjustments to improve the accuracy of your report.
Allocate costs to appropriate calendar months
Calendarization is a method for allocating bill cost and consumption data to appropriate calendar months for analysis and reporting.
Whether you’re issuing charges to tenants or budgeting for future expenses, calendarization helps you more accurately represent month-to-month costs, regardless of the various start and end dates found on your bills.
For instance, in Atrius you can allocate data on a month-by-month basis by prorating daily cost and consumption over each day of the bill period. Or, you can allocate data to the month in which the statement invoice had been issued.
In the card configuration form, make the following selection:
Field | Instructions |
Calendarize by | Select the desired calendarization method: 'Prorated months', 'Calendar months', 'Bill point start dates', 'Bill point end dates', or 'Statement dates'. |
Normalize for weather and occupancy differences
Normalization is a method for estimating consumption under typical conditions, with the effects of weather and occupancy removed.
If you’re comparing buildings across different geographic locations, each having different outdoor temperature conditions, then these conditions may interfere with your ability to determine why some buildings are spending more than others.
Extreme weather events may leave you scratching your head when looking at a year-over-year comparison, for example. Or, a period of uncharacteristically high vacancy may lead you to make incorrect judgments about spending allocations in the forthcoming year’s budget.
In the card configuration form for Year-over-Year Trends cards only, make the following selection:
Field | Instructions |
Normalize by | Select the desired normalization technique: 'Weather', 'Occupied area', or both. |
Make adjustments based on data completeness
Because utility bill data may arrive with a one- or two-month lag, Atrius can make automatic adjustments to the period and the data displayed in your cost reports.
Callout adjustments are features in Atrius that allow you to control how totals, averages, and percent difference values are calculated, while graph adjustments control how graphs are displayed. These two adjustment methods can be controlled independently of each other, giving you ultimate flexibility.
Left: June and July lack complete data during this period (highlighted). Right: June and July are removed from the graph, until lagging or missing bills are available.
📘 Example
Let’s say your utility bill data hasn’t arrived for the last month. Worse yet, there’s a missing bill from a few months ago. Your goal is to accurately represent bill costs this year compared to the previous year, in spite of the incomplete bill record.
To deal with the lagging bill from last month, you could select a callout adjustment in which the end date is determined by the last month with data in both the current year and previous year. And to deal with the missing bill, you could exclude the month in the previous year that corresponds to the month with the missing bill in the current year.
Finally, you could choose to adjust the graph to end at the last month of complete data, rather than display the incomplete previous month. When the lagging monthly bill finally arrives, the graph will automatically adjust to display the complete graph.
In the card configuration form, make the following selections:
Field | Instructions |
Callouts | Select the desired options for: Period start, Period end, Period data gaps, and Adjustments method. If you're uncertain, use the default selections. |
In the card configuration form for Trends or Year-over-Year Trends cards only, make the following selections:
Field | Instructions |
Period | Select 'Last 12 months' to activate graph adjustments. Then, select 'Adjust graph to end at last month of complete data'. |
Predict future months' bill costs
Baselines are statistical models that help you predict consumption based on historic usage and other variables, like weather and occupancy.
If you want to benchmark your buildings against “normal” use, or estimate bill cost savings from an energy efficiency project, then baselines can help you create an accurate model that gives you insight into your buildings’ future estimated spend.
If you have bill points, then you're ready to begin creating baselines. Follow these steps to get started:
Go to Bills on the left side menu.
Select a bill point, then go to the Baselines tab.
Select the ‘Add a baseline’ button.
Once your baseline is finished processing, you can add the baseline to a card. In the card configuration form for Trends or Year-over-Year Trends cards only, make the following selection:
Field | Instructions |
Overlay | Select one of the baseline models you had earlier created. |
Use multiple currencies across different geographies
Currency conversions enables localization of bill costs. Atrius uses an industry-standard currency conversion API that stores daily currency conversion rates for every available currency, as well as monthly average rates.
If your organization is multinational, then chances are you have bills issued to you in different currencies. When you analyze or report on bill data in Atrius, you can express these bill costs in a uniform currency across building locations.
Some organizations have custom currency rates, which are defined each month. If that’s your organization, then you can easily override the currency conversion API values with your own monthly average rates.
In the card configuration form, make the following selection:
Field | Instructions |
Currency | Select the desired uniform currency. |