With the ever-expanding cost of running a business, many owners and operators are approaching their monthly budgets with added levels of scrutiny. Understanding what you’re spending and where is a crucial part of finding opportunities to strategically reduce your costs and help your bottom line. But understanding how your spending isn’t always a simple task—especially when it comes to utility bills.
Your utility bill is probably one of the most chaotic parts of your business’s budget, and parsing through it is nearly impossible. But there is some method behind the madness of energy bills, and in this blog post we’ll both help you understand why utility bills are so difficult to understand—and share the best way to simplify them for your business.
For most business owners, the simplest way to think of your overall budget is monthly, aligned to the dates of the calendar. Unfortunately, it is almost never the case that your utility bills sync up with the calendar months. Instead, your bills will cover month-long periods of random dates, like March 13 to April 12. This can make trying to assess, for example, your monthly energy spending for your March budget.
Worse yet, these periods can change year to year, and some calendar months you may get multiple utility bills. And if you run multiple locations of your business, each one will likely have a different billing period that you’ll have to keep track of and pay separately.
Most utilities electronically receive data from meters every few minutes. With this data, they can determine at which times the demand for energy use is highest. This is important information that helps utilities forecast future usage needs, so they are prepared to supply demand. They also use this data to drive up the prices during peak hours and peak times of year.
That means the energy your business uses in summer or in the evening, when demand is often at its peak, may be more expensive than the energy you use on a morning in winter. Which means even if your business is using a similar amount of energy each month, your bills will vary a lot throughout the year.
Again, this also becomes even more complex when you own multiple locations, as peak usage varies by location.
It can be difficult to wrap your head around all the variable dates and bills, especially when some bills don’t even provide details on your consumption and simply tell you the amount you owe. Even if you can start to wrap your head around all the chaos, budgeting for the future is still difficult. And that’s because utility rates are on the rise, and your future bills will likely be higher than the past—even if you continue use the same amount of energy.
The unpredictability of this can be really stressful for business owners. Luckily, though, there’s a way to simplify your energy bills and use much less energy—at no cost. That may sound too good to be true, but keep reading to see how it works.
Budderfly helps businesses use less energy by providing free energy-efficient equipment upgrades. Using less energy helps both your business bottom line and the planet. It’s a win-win.
However, another way we help businesses is by simplifying utility bills. When you partner with Budderfly, we take over your utility bills. We look at your past 24 months of energy usage and normalize your consumption to calendar months using our patented AMU (average monthly usage) billing system. Then we bill you regularly—on the 5th of each calendar month.
There are a few key benefits to Budderfly’s billing system. Firstly, combined with our energy saving technology, you end up paying less than you would have paid on your bills. Also, you get more insight into your past energy consumption, so you can forecast your budget more accurately. Even if utility rates rise, you’ll at least be able to see what they’d be with no increase and anticipate what your bills will look like if they do.
This is really helpful, because with bills directly from utility providers, you may not realize that even though you paid a bill in September, it was actually largely for energy you used in August. Or you may get two bills in September and not understand why. We take away all this chaos and save you money.
Plus, for multiple location owners, we really simplify things. If you have 50 locations, we’ll send you the invoices for each and let you pay all together as one sum, instead of sending 50 different payments.
Best of all, Budderfly’s customer portal gives you deep insights about your energy use. With data collected by our sophisticated metering technology, you’ll not only only see how much energy you’re using each month—you can also see how each specific piece of equipment is consuming energy. This allows you to have a comprehensive understanding of your energy use habits, compare different months and even days of usage, and to identify opportunities to save even more.
Want to learn more about how Budderfly can reduce your energy consumption and get a simplified utility bill each month—at absolutely no cost? Contact Budderfly today and one of our experts can answer any questions you have!