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Utility bill maker for Accounting

[Music] welcome to vervanster's podcast series and in this episode we're going to be talking about utility bill processing management and payment which is actually very topical for a lot of companies who are currently looking at outsourcing strategies to streamline some of their processes and help them find cost savings so today i'm joined by ashley gill from our solutions team who's kindly agreed to join us and share the discussion as ashley's involved with energy consumers every day she's promised to make sure we answer the questions you're keen to ask because you know what i'm bound to forget so welcome ashley hello dan let's get to the first question um what is utility bill management i don't think a lot of people know that this is a service so utility bill management for most organizations um that you know have larger portfolios they they are well used to receiving processing validating and paying bills and utility bills can be an absolute bind for them so if you're a small mom-and-pop shop and you've got you know one or two locations you're likely you're going to have two three four utility accounts for each premise so really it's not big issue to be managing you know four or eight utility bills a month but if you have a thousand locations as a lot of our customers do then all of a sudden that's a much bigger problem because you will literally have four or five thousand invoices flowing in every month and that can overwhelm an ap team so you'll have all those invoices coming in and of course as you know the ap team has to make sure that payments they make are legitimate they have to do their checks and balances and obviously they do what they can to validate the invoices they'll be looking for any obvious you know shocks in cost but it becomes tricky for them when you have that volume especially when they're doing a race against time to get them paid because most utilities will only give about 15 days to pay an invoice so it's super important that they get through that process and and it's not cheap for a company to to deliver that so that's in a nutshell what utility bill management is it's the outsourcing of that very time-consuming administrative heavy process of paying utility bills but isn't this just all a core function of having a company or what benefit is there to outsourcing it ah that's true i mean you know account payable functions of course their core functions to the business but i think organizations are recognizing that in order to very quickly process and validate correctly utility bills um they need a a deeper set of tools and knowledge and expertise to do that effectively because it's just just too much information and and it will slow the organization down and if they try and uh do a better job of that then they're having to employ employ more people to turn the handle on doing that and it's it's it's just can get very very expensive and then of course they're finding that it's not actually going to be delivering the results that they need in terms of all the reporting so you're right it is a core function but i think as i said before companies are really looking deeply within themselves to find these opportunities to find cost savings and streamline the way that they're doing things so what does vervantes's utility bill management process look like if you're a large company you you know you're going to be receiving all these invoices that can be coming in from all these different utility vendors and let's just put this in perspective so across the us you have over three and a half thousand utility companies for example they're gonna have their different billing formats they're gonna be making their way into you and and that's a lot to process so what we do is we we'll immediately contact all of your utility companies and we will get them to divert those utility bills from you to our central processing location when those utility invoices arrive they will be scanned keyed validated and then a funding file created that's actually custom built to map straight into your whatever your accounts payable software is so that you have some time to review it and then fund a central disbursement account uh from where the utilities are securely funded actually over 90 by ach but uh are securely funded then to pay those bills so it really does streamline it down and as you notice from that walk through you know there's a validation process which goes on as well and that process uh typically is a 48 hour process so it really does speed things up how long does onboarding of a client take onboarding will vary depending on the client size makeup quality of data and so on but i would say if you want a good rule of thumb about 45 to 60 days some can be fast-tracked and get on a little bit quicker others may take a little longer just depends as i've said on the number of accounts that we're having to take on and validate and clean all the data and get them moving and i can't understate the value of that data cleansing process at onboarding it's the old adage you know if you put rubbish in you're going to get you know you're going to get trash out the other end so it's really important to make sure the data is a good quality and i'll give you a good example of that we we've actually onboarded a customer before who had you know many thousands of accounts and on that onboarding process we identified over uh over a 130 accounts which they were paying bills on but shouldn't have been and it's just there was a disconnect between the real estate team and the facilities team which hadn't been picked up so you know they were still paying utility bills for accounts for properties that they hadn't actually been in for a while so you know and that's immediate kind of right off the the bottom line it's just adding adding value from from day one so it's a really important part of the process to get right these companies are trusting us with their money what assurances do they have that their funds are protected with us well that's a very good question and we we go the extra mile we think in in trying to give those assurances um vervantis is a soc to type 2 certified organization anyway so what that means is that our policies and our processes are independently attested to make sure that they are robust and it means that we also have regular third-party penetrate penetration testing of our systems and software to make sure they are secure so that's that's kind of the first first part of this uh of this process of security i think the other part is that when uh customers are funding those accounts that central disbursement account is actually never it's not in our control it's not in our hand so we can't you know access funds that customers deposit uh and and the only way those funds can move from that disbursement account is actually to the vendor accounts that have been pre-pre-prescribed so it's a it's a very secure process are there any other protections we offer yeah i mean obviously we as a as an organization we put a lot of thought into the you know how we can give those assurances and give customers confidence in us in our process and aside from the fact that we're sock 2 type 2 um with a big track record of looking after tens of thousands of utility accounts and i think we're about a one and a half billion dollar spend for clients currently so you know we are we are a larger organization but we underpin that with some significant insurance not just business insurance but even go further with things like cyber insurance a really high level of cyber insurance which helps to give customers that those protections if things were to for any reason go wrong are there any guarantees since we're handling these invoices how do they know that if we mess up they they are still protected if we drop the ball on processing an invoice then uh naturally we hold our hands up and uh and you know we take uh we take the full kind of hit for that so we all provide financial compensation so we have a late fee guarantee that will that will do that um and and provide that but we do you know the the process that we have we do work in incredibly diligently to make sure that we we're not dropping the ball in our process but more importantly that the ball isn't getting dropped on just the day-to-day operation of receiving an invoice so for example you know we we will consider an invoice missing if it hasn't arrived at a set number of days prior to the normal due date that's when it comes missing in our in our world and we'll be chasing that down to make sure that you know there aren't any late fees in the first place along the other parts of the process what visibility do our clients get to us handling all these things for them so vervantis has spent a lot of a lot of time and continues to spend invest a lot of a lot of time and money in our systems so we have our own proprietary software which allows customers a really a really good level of visibility into their entire program actually not just utility bill management but it will allow them to see you know every invoice not just the pdf but all the line item data and we're actually one of the few services that gathers a hundred percent of the line item data off the invoice which allows not just really good quality reporting data but it allows us to um to really go in a deeper dive to find things like overspends to find those areas where you know you're trying to find those energy hogs or outliers in the portfolio so if a company puts in a request for an open close can they see the steps of the process they're on on that they can you know when there are new accounts that need to be set up or accounts that need to be closed for different locations and they have that miserable task of trying to get through to a utility company they're on hold often for you know hours trying to get through and get this dealt with but in our system the software itself you can just click on really easily make the request and the entire process is mapped through the systems you've got complete visibility of of the request that's made to open or close what status it's in what's been done we even track all the email correspondence is actually tracked in the system too as it relates to you know that uh what's going on with a particular site so you can really quickly come in and you can search by site number and you can actually find all that information instantly so it's really really powerful with all these moving parts though it sounds like it would be easy for things to get lost and then result in a disconnection so how often does that happen in our process disconnections are incredibly rare i i won't say that they don't happen they're incredibly rare and in fact you know in the uh you know the five or so years that we've been operating we've only ever had i think it's two disconnections and actually that's not because of our process falling down it's because they were accounts that were never notified by the client that they were part of their uh part of their site so we didn't even know they existed and so it didn't uh it until they were actually uh having that disconnection situation it didn't raise its head but again our team is is very adept at working with the you know emergency situations so we were able to work very quickly with utilities get power restored get the account set up correctly and mapping it through the billing system so you know not only was that dealt with really quickly but it was back on and billing properly and we'd mapped it through to make sure it never happened again you kind of touched on this already but how much contact do our clients have with their utility providers we never exclude our customers from talking to their utility companies or any vendor company suppliers we think it's really important that they have those the ability to have those relationships and have that contact where needed because i think a lot there's an awful lot of value which utility companies can bring to customers so so that's that's the first thing however when it comes to managing um the utility bill processing and management you know the whole rationale is is that our teams will manage most of that activity the idea being that our customers really are going to be managing by exception so we were very very hands-on with the experts at the elbow we're the first port of call for everything we will manage everything directly we can you know deal with most exceptions about over 95 percent of exceptions we deal with um directly with utility companies on your behalf so really you only have to get involved if you have to get involved and i think that works quite well there's a good balance there so what would you say are the top five benefits of our process i think for our customers um they certainly see that the top five as um as having some good assurance so it's knowing that their utility bills have been have had the attention to detail through a good validation process that they're having those overspends highlighted and addressed where they've got outliers in their in their portfolio making sure their invoices are paid on time is obviously really really important so i think the number one thing is really assurance that they've got a trusted partner looking after things and making thoughts sure that things are kind of happening as they should i think the second thing is that they recognize how much of their valuable resources can be freed up so that they can focus on on higher priority projects and i think that's that's really important you know it's having people in your organization it's quite costly you know by the time you factor it all through so if you can take them off mindless administrative low value tasks like this and put them on higher value projects that's definitely an area where customers are benefiting i think the third thing is that they do get a much greater visibility of their cost their use the trends really that flows from having good high quality data on their uh on their spend and it really really does help and it will really support other things as well like energy procurement programs or sustainability reporting once you've got that really good quality data flowing there's an awful lot that you can do with it i think the fourth thing is is that they enjoy uh a fewer late fees um anyone out there with large portfolios knows how quickly that they can add up um you know if you take too long to evaluate an invoice then they're going to throw on a late fee we're very good at avoiding those late fees and actually arguing when to have them removed at times when they have been applied so so that's important so making sure we have fewer late fees and and less supply disruptions is obviously really important that's a good value that they that they see and i guess uh fifth i mean by far from last but one of the fifth main main points is really that they have a much more streamlined funding process where instead of having hundreds or thousands of payments being made those are condensed to just a few uh you know secure transactions you know we create funding files as the customers need them which can be you know every day but most clients will say okay we'll have a monday wednesday friday funding arrangement and that tends to work well but they certainly appreciate the fact they're not having to write you know hundreds or thousands of checks out to all these different companies and try and get the payments there on time all right well if a company is interested in looking to this solution more how can they get a hold of us i think the first thing they should do is to obviously drop us a line if they can provide us with a little bit more information about you know the number of utility accounts that they uh have to manage and and that type of thing that will really help us but they can drop some information through in the first instance to info at vervantis.com or they can call our toll-free number which is one triple eight nine double eight five four seven four um and we'll be able to give them much more information and uh schedule some time to give a demonstration of the system and and really show them firsthand how it will streamline things for them uh uh any more questions no no okay good well i hope uh i hope that's uh you know given you a bit of an insight into the utility management field management programs that we we have and that's you know we've given you a very high level of some of the value adds that um that come from the process but you know if you do have more questions you've got those uh contact details there you can reach out to us and we'll gladly answer your questions as they arise so yeah thank you again for joining me and again if you found this information useful and informative well join us for our next podcast because we're going to be covering uh energy procurement in a bit more detail and how to reduce the costs of not just your from your energy suppliers competitive energy suppliers where you have open direct access markets but we're also going to be looking at how you can reduce costs in regulated utility markets which you know a lot more people are in those in those areas so we'll be covering that and we look forward to continuing the discussion [Music]