WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Aquicore’s utility spend calculations depend on having utility bills for every service and for every month. Without that, the system defaults the blended rate to the last month that we had all bills.

For properties that have third-party suppliers, switching to a new supplier makes the system think that it never had all of the bills required. If you ever see a property with a blended rate of $0.120 for every month or the same blended rate for every month, then it likely has this problem.

This property then appears to be way under budget, which is inaccurate

The product calculates utility spend by multiplying real-time metered consumption by a calculated blended rate, which is calculated from utility bills.

See below for an example of how this calculation works:

January Spend = 651,046 kWh x 0.120 $/kWh = $78,126

The blended rate is calculated by adding up the total charges for all utility bills with an end date in that month, divided by all of the consumption for non-third party suppliers, with an end date in that month. See the table below for an example:

If there isn’t a bill for every electricity utility service with an end date in the month, then the system looks for the most recent month with all bills. This logic helps fill gaps where bills might be missing and helps avoid wild swings in estimated spend when 2 bills both end in the same month (e.g. bill 1 goes from March 2 - April 1 and bill 2 goes from April 1 - April 30).

However, when a new utility account comes online and another is shut off, then there will never be a month with all utility bills.

“Service Start Dates” and “Service End Dates” fields have been added to the utility service setup page in the UBM module. To set these, go to the Utility Accounts page and click on the Utility Service.

By default, these dates aren’t set, so the system will expect bills for every service indefinitely into the past and future.

By specifying the start or end date of service, the system will no longer expect bills for the service before or after the date, respectively. It will also no longer factor in bills outside of the service dates.

In the example above, once I set the service dates for “3rd Party Supplier B-1” and “3rd Party Supplier B-2” to the following, the system will now recognize that it has all expected bills for every service and calculate the blended rate and the spend for the building correctly.