Frequently Asked Questions - Reporting

Utility Manager offers a large variety of different types of reports and graphs for different purposes. 

• Setup reports provide a quick reference of included facilities, utility vendors, accounts, and meters. 
• Invoice review reports allow for viewing a complete billing history on any account, detecting gaps in your billing history, finding missing bills, and running an extensive billing audit to locate usage and cost anomalies. 
• Analysis reports offer ranking and historical reports and graphs that compare a facility both to itself and to other facilities over any selected time period. 
• Forecast and budget reports allow you to develop and edit a forecast of utility costs in a future year, create a budget, and then to compare actual costs to what was budgeted. 
• Emissions Reports convert your past and current energy use to carbon dioxide emissions for greenhouse gas reporting.

Yes!  Many comparison reports and graphs are available that rank facilities based on the common parameters of energy use per square foot, energy cost per square foot, energy use per square foot per heating degree day, etc.  Facilities can also be compared and ranked based on a defined "production unit" such as "students", "hours of use", "widgets produced", etc., that you may also choose to track. 

Yes!  Utility Manager offers a full-featured, integrated Advanced Cost Avoidance module to allow great power and versatility in the calculation of weather-adjusted energy savings and cost avoidance.  To account for the effect of weather conditions on utility consumption, Utility Manager looks at the impact of two weather-related factors in addition to changes in square footage and rates: cooling degree days (CDD) and heating degree days (HDD).  Both monthly and daily weather data are easily downloaded into UM and updated monthly.  Utility Manager then uses sophisticated linear regression analysis to examine the relationship between weather and energy usage at each location.  This analysis ensures that the effects of weather are accurately taken into account when comparing the current level of energy use to an earlier (or "baseline") period.

While most users of Utility Manager find their reporting needs very effectively addressed by Utility Manager's pre-defined reports, the program also offers users the ability to create and save custom reports.  Saved custom reports can be used again and again and like all reports in Utility Manager, run on various levels and time periods.  Also like most other reports, custom reports can be exported for use in Excel or saved to a PDF file.

Absolutely.  A great deal of effort has gone into making it easy to get data out of Utility Manager beyond simply printing a report.  There are three primary ways data can be exported to other applications:

Exporting Utility Manager reports:  Once a report has been generated in Utility Manager using the various selection criteria offered, the report itself can be exported out in a number of ways:

• Excel
• CSV (comma-delimited) text file
• Fixed-length text file
• Adobe Acrobat PDF

Exporting Utility Manager billing data:   Utility Manager also lets users export the raw billing data in the system as well.  The program offers several pre-defined formats, allows user-defined formats, and allows users to select the account(s) included, the date range included, and other settings as well.

Exporting Accounts Payable data:  With the optional "AP Link" feature, Utility Manager can also be custom-programmed to output billing data in the precise format required by a customer's Accounts Payable system.