What comes to your mind when you hear about managing big and numerous renewable energy data from diverse projects? If energy billing processes at the end of the month are tedious and time consuming you should continue reading this post about how automated renewable energy billing can change your perception.
Managing RE assets is largely about handling many bills. In the real sense, invoices and bills form a large part of renewable assets handling. It may surprise you that they are some of the simplest to handle if you automate the process.
At QBI Solutions, we have a billing and invoicing feature, that has been designed by renewable asset management experts to fit your needs. Before we present the feature, it is worthwhile to explain why we deemed it fit to invest in the development of this automatic billing.
Reasons to Automate Billing
Accounts Receivable
Let us take the case of solar photovoltaic (PV). This energy business involves two major invoicing types. On the one side we have direct invoicing, whereby the client receives the invoice directly for the power produced. On the other hand, we have the shadow billing based on automatic payment of the power as indicated in the utility meter.
The first alternative lays the responsibility on you as asset manager to deliver accurate and prompt invoices. This is particularly critical when the supplier has a tight payment day very close to the closing date. Any delay in submitting the invoice can mean serious cash flow problems. For the cash cycle of your RE project to be shorter, it is important that the invoice is sent faster and approved quicker.
Accounts Payable
We have presented a case of money coming in, but what about what is going out? What bills for your RE project do you have to follow and pay? Examples of common ones are operator fees, electricity bills, maintenance company charges and insurance.
Incomes Automatic Billing
Automating billing and invoicing in your RE business are a must beyond discussion…as asset manager you must avoid the tedious manual tasks and free your team to engage in more valuable activities. Let them do things that will actually increase profitability for your company.
All you need to start automatic billing is your data, a project, a billing template, and of course, a budget for the service. That makes you ready for automation to create invoices from information and data. QBI Solutions can automate anything including power factor penalties, escalators and time of use.
You no longer need to undertake performance downloads from multiple sources and manual calculations. The days of pasting data in the Excel document, reviewing it and submitting it manually to the client are over.
Why You Need Automatic Billing
In the renewable energy industry, copy and pasting is the order of the day. Not only is this a tedious job, but it is also prone to errors. It can easily have a negative effect on business cash flow.
Most of the RE asset management organizations are lean, although they handle sizeable projects. We often find a small team managing tens of projects, sometimes more than 50. They handle the invoicing process together with other higher-value-added activities with the difficulties that imply balancing transactional work that requires concentration on details with operational work that requires focus on value.
Automatic billing saves resources and allows the team to focus on what really matters. You see the benefits from the first month with no investment needed if you rely on QBI as a SaaS solution.
With QBI Solutions in the Picture
In QBI Solutions we are asset managers who have developed the right solution for our industry colleagues. Using QBI tool to take control of your billing process through automatic invoicing. QBI’s paperless and effective billing management feature allows you to generate invoices automatically by connecting to your energy meters and sending them from the platform, as easy as it seems.
Have you always wanted to customize your energy tariffs? QBI can tailor the tariff module to any of the worldwide revenue schemes with the ability to generate Rates/MWh, Capacity Payments, NMCs (net metering credits), ROCs/SRECs, TOU (time-of-use in hourly basis), fixed amounts or even merchant prices. It allows you to attach all your PPA related documentation for further traceability.
When you need to automatically gather pool prices, the platform is reliable. QBI connects automatically to the main energy markets and downloads the energy hourly prices.
The system is your biggest opportunity to maximize your revenue. It will demonstrate all the generated energy, even where invoicing is yet to take place. As long as the energy passed through the meter, there is an invoice ready for it.
The customization level at QBI is something else. Promote your brand through custom invoice templates. Other features of this product are customer relation, where customers can access the platform, and bulk generation of monthly invoices.
Fig 1: QBI Billing Management Platform, Simple and Effective
Conclusion
Are you using the QBI platform yet? Do you need to have the kind of efficiency described here in your renewable energy portfolio? We would like to hear from you. Get in touch for more information about automated invoicing at QBI solutions.
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