Bill audits overview

Bill audits are powerful tools for data validation. They examine utility bill data for accuracy and unusual patterns of use or cost. When they detect a potential issue, audits automatically flag the bill for manual review, indicating that further investigation may be needed.

A single bill flag can contain one or more issues and you can manage each issue separately. Once you close the last open issue on a flag, the flag automatically closes.

Four ways to view and manage bill flags and issues

• Bill lists with configured filters to view flags and issues.
• Flags tab for accounts, cost centers, meters, sites, and organizations.
• Dashboard content to see flag types, issues, and assignees.
• Report-27 to generate a list of all bills and flag details.

Bill audits

• Help to make sure accurate information is available for reporting and analysis.
• Automatically run as you enter or import bills.
• Analyze and provide feedback after you enter bills.
• Skip void and accrual bills.

Disable audits on specific accounts

You can disable audits for any account from the Actions menu or directly from the bill.

Chargeback bills and audits

• Outlier audits run when chargeback bills are created. No other audits run for chargebacks during the create process.
• If you edit a chargeback bill and it fails any audit, it is flagged.
• You can analyze generated bills in Chargeback Workflow.

How do bills get flagged?

• Automatically with bill audits.
• Manually by users.

Bill Flag rules

1. When all flag issues are resolved, the flag is automatically resolved.
2. When the flag is resolved all flag issues are automatically resolved.
3. If an edit to the bill did not fix one of the issues that was previously manually resolved, that issue will be reopened. For example, high use or cost.

Manage bill flags and flag issues

• Each bill can only have one assigned flag.
• Flags have a type (users can also create their own types). Audit Exception is a flag type assigned when a bill fails a configured audit from the Bills module menu.
  • Each audit failure creates a flag issue. These issues can be assigned and resolved independently of the flag.

Example of Audit Exception

Issues are shown in the banner and are managed with Manage Issues. 

Each issue can be managed separately. When there are multiple issues on a flag you can reopen an issue if needed. When you resolve the last issue on a flag the flag is automatically resolved.

Dashboard widgets for flagged bills

You can build a dashboard dedicated to viewing and resolving bill flags or add bill flag content to an existing dashboard.

Bill flag during manual bill entry

If your user role has permission you see additional options when entering and saving a flagged bill.

Save bill and resolve flag

Resolve the flag while saving the bill. This is recorded in flag details.

Save and flag bill

Save the bill and flag it for future review.

Resolve a bill flag

If your edit of a flagged bill resolves the flag issue, the flag issue status is automatically resolved and recorded in the flag details tab.

Sometimes an edit isn't required and you want to resolve the bill flag or flag issue. You can manually resolve the flag issue and update the comments section as needed. The flag details tab stores the history of all flag status updates and comments.

Assign and update a bill flag

If your user role has permission, you can add a flag to any bill that requires additional attention.

• Flag Types such as billing error or questionable bill, are in the drop-down, create additional types to help categorize your bills.
• Assignee is optional, you can assign one or more users. You are only able to assign users with a user role or permissions to edit the bill. Type part of the first or last name to see a smaller list of users.
• Comments provide a running history of research and actions on the bill.
• Hold bill from accounting export to hold the bill and flag at the same time. (If licensed for Accounting Export.)
• You can track and report on savings with the Cost Recovery option.

Manage bill flags in bulk

You can manage bill flags in bulk from a bill list.

1. Set your filters or use the quick filters to find flagged bills you want to take action on.
2. Click the flag button.
3. Select Resolve or Update.

Permissions

Chargeback bills and audits

For bill splits and summary bills, problems with the source bills lead to problems with generated bills.

Bill Audits are performed on source bills to help you determine if they are correct. If the source bills are correct it follows the generated bills are correct.

Chargeback Workflow is designed to help you easily identify issues before and after creating chargeback bills.

Only outlier audits are performed on the generated chargeback bills.

Example

For most types of chargebacks there can be legitimate reasons for multiple bills in a billing period, and this would cause a large number of bills to be flagged in error.

Chargeback bills analysis

Review generated bills in Chargeback Workflow.

• Identify meters without a bill when you expect there to be one (sometimes indicative of missing readings).
• Identify meters with multiple bills when that’s not what you’re expecting.
• Identify high usage variance compared to either the previous month or the previous year.
• Identify negative, zero, or abnormally high use or cost.
• Identify abnormal unit costs.