Impress Your Boss - Utility and Facility Expense Management Services
Posted by Todd Calman on Fri, Dec 17, 2010 @ 10:22 AM
Did your boss just ask for this fiscal year's utility budget? Are you dreading the long hours of work that it will take to put together this type of comprehensive report? If you used tools that reduced labor intensive processes, such as those high volume recurring utility expenses, you could significantly reduce the amount of work and aggravation it would take to gather the data. Many tools will allow you to run on-demand reports that provide you all the information you need, on-demand.
More and more often, companies are exploring options to consolidate their utility expenses. Having only one bill, or having bills delivered in a way that allows the invoice data to flow directly into an accounting system, significantly reduces the utility bill lifecycle.
A company can't survive without utility services. And in some cases, the actual cost of paying for these services is more than the actual invoice. Outsourcing utility and telecom expense management is becoming very popular for businesses of all types and sizes. Aggregating billing and payables, performing utility bill validation are all important task in reducing facility expenses. Companies that specialize in utility, telecom and facility expense and dispute management, provide greater opportunities then if you go at this yourself.
Typically, a utility expense management company will consolidate all of a company's utility bills and present only one bill. This paperless bill is delivered in a format that configures to your current financial system. Even if it took an employee 15 minutes to handle the entire lifecycle of an invoice, from opening the bill, to entering it in a system, to having it paid, to filing it away, to finding it for dispute resolution, paying 5-6 utility bills can chew up more than an hour of time. When you consider the cost of paying that same employee wages and benefits, and some time overtime, the cost of paying your utility bills each month can range up to what one of the invoices may be. Consider using a utility expense management system to increase margins, improve efficiency and reduce overhead.