As sustainability leaders continually step up their game when it comes to tracking, managing and reducing energy use, they almost always hit a significant roadblock: Actually getting their energy use data from utilities.

Energy use data (kWh for electricity, therms of natural gas, etc.) rarely exist electronically in companies. Paper utility bills are received and manually processed monthly, which can mean hundreds of bills per month for a large company with hundreds or thousands of locations.

As a result, more and more companies are looking to utility bill management vendors for assistance -- and the vendors are also stepping up their game. These vendors are in a very good position to help companies build and maintain a company-wide database or "system of record" of energy use and cost.

Companies will need to determine if one or two vendors are required to satisfy their utility bill management, carbon management, and energy needs, and I'm here to help you take stock of this growing market.

The Scope of the Problem

The difficulty in getting hard energy-use data, in electronic format, takes on an additional burden because of the importance of those data to mission-critical sustainability initiatives, including:

• Calculating a company's carbon footprint for CSR reports,
• Completing surveys for groups like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index,
• Submitting information to registries like the Carbon Disclosure Project, and
• Complying with surveys from customers like Walmart and IBM

This information is not typically available electronically because energy use information is rarely collected in financial accounting systems, such as those from SAP or Oracle.

The default approach is manual data entry into a spreadsheet or database by facilities, EHS, sustainability, or finance teams. Not only is this process almost always laborious and error-prone, it can also be problematic, as it takes time to identify the right individual and to obtain the necessary approval to get this task added to a person's job description. This manual approach is further complicated by personnel turnover.

One apparent solution is to obtain the energy data electronically from the utilities, but few utilities actually offer this data electronically -- and this situation doesn't appear likely to change much in the next 3–5 years, even with the increased use of utility smart meters.

Next page: Utility bill management vendors come to the rescue