As described elsewhere in our site (see FAQs), Utility Manager has been designed over the last 25 years to streamline manual data entry into the program. But, whenever we can help a customer electronically import their utility bills into Utility Manager rather than manually enter them, that's a great thing. Importing utility bills can save a tremendous amount of time in entering bills not to mention avoid data entry errors. Utility Manager is uniquely powerful and flexible in its ability to import utility bills.
We're building "custom import formats" for several of our current Utility Manager software projects. For instance, the Boulder Valley School District in Boulder CO is able to obtain ongoing monthly billing spreadsheet files from Xcel Energy, their gas and electric provider. With their fully integrated "custom import format" for Xcel Energy, Boulder Valley will be able to import all the "billing determinants" from the Xcel bills such as account and meter numbers, service period dates, line item definitions, usage values, costs values, and so on into Utility Manager electronically, quickly, and accurately. Similarly, for our project with the City of Greensboro NC, we're building into Utility Manager the capability to import their Duke Power Bills as well as the City's water bills. A third example is a little different. For the State of Tennessee, rather than importing utility bills from their vendors into Utility Manager, a custom import format will allow them to import billing information they're capturing in the accounts payable system (including usage and cost details) into Utility Manager.
If a customer's vendors can provide pretty much any kind of spreadsheet billing on an ongoing basis, we can usually create a custom import format that allows that billing information to be imported into Utility Manager.