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. Audits automatically flag bills for manual review and indicate there may be a problem.

Four ways to view and manage flagged bills

• Bill lists with configured filters to view flagged bills.
• Flags tab for accounts, cost centers, meters, buildings, 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 details

View a bill to review bill flags or take actions on the flag.

Dashboards for flagged bills

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

Use quick filters on bill lists

While viewing a bill list, quick filters let you refine your bill list to see a subset of bills.

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, the flag 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. You can manually change the flag status to resolved 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 flag any bill that requires additional attention and update any flag settings.

• 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 many 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.
• Hold bill from account export to hold the bill and flag at the same time.
• Comments provide a running history of research and actions on the bill.
• If licensed for Account Export an option exists to hold the bill from export.
• Track savings with the Cost Recovery option.

Resolve multiple flags at one time

You can resolve, assign, or update multiple flagged bills at one time on the Flags tab.

1. On the Flags tab use the filters to find the specific bills.
2. Select one or more bills.
3. Use the drop menu Flag Actions and choose Resolve, Assign, 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.

Bills entered before release 7.5 and audits

Any bills entered or imported before release 7.5 are not flagged unless you edit and save the bill or reimport the bills.

For any bills entered or imported before Release 7.5, UtilityManagement performs a preliminary audit when you edit the bill to warn you about potential issues. The bill is NOT flagged until you save the bill.

Bill audit comparison across versions