Managing utility and energy bills is critical for utilities, not because of collecting money. It’s about running a resilient, compliant, customer-friendly, and future-ready utility business.
Accurate, timely, and transparent billing ensures companies maintain a healthy and consistent cash flow, enhancing trust with customers and regulations. From an ops point of view, effective bill management streamlines back-office operations with automation.
Utilities get happy customers who know what they pay for, and you make smart, data-driven decisions and set the groundwork for innovation.
Otherwise, if this core business activity is lagging behind, how can you grow?
In this piece, we’ll cover:
- The key 3 steps for you to manage utility & energy bills effectively
- Utility cost reduction strategies
- How utilities cut costs with MaxBill utility billing solution.
Let’s get started.
Key Takeaways
- Utility expense reduction and the automation of energy cost management are simply a must due to macro factors, competition, and ambitions to grow.
- Utility cost management in current market conditions is an adaptation to challenges by creating a valuable offer for the end customer.
- Conducting a market analysis is one of the ways to build a utility expense reduction mechanism.
- Customer-centric utilities offer a unique value proposition with the low-cost-to-serve concept built in.
- Automation of billing is an integral part of utility cost management as it removes a broad set of manual tasks from the equation.
- Utility expense reduction strategies lay around costs on energy procurement, own energy independence, maintenance costs, and UVP.
- MaxBill modern billing and CIS help utilities cut costs via hyperautomation, AI-powered solutions for debt and churn prediction, and AI self-care portal.
- MaxBill new-gen AI billing and product catalog delivers a new level of capacities around product/service roll-out, market expansion and compliance.
Why utility cost management is a strategic priority
Utility expense reduction and the automation of energy cost management are a critical necessity for companies that aim to maintain their market positions. And here’s why:
- Due to political and economic turbulence, energy prices are constantly changing.
- Enterprises are trying to reduce costs, switching to their energy sources and opting for lower tariffs from third-party providers.
- Service providers face competition and enable customer retention strategies.
An individual offer for each B2B client may become a way out of the situation — but not at the cost of financial losses.
3 steps to manage utility & energy bills effectively
Utility cost management in current market conditions is an adaptation to challenges by creating a valuable offer for the end customers of your service. And to achieve this goal, you will need:
- Conducting market analysis with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ offers.
- Developing a unique value proposition based on customer requests and typical problems.
- Implementing automated systems for consumption accounting and billing.
It is precisely this sequence that will enable you to develop a robust pricing system for a utility enterprise.
Related:
The ultimate utility bill management software by MaxBill.
Conducting market analysis with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ offers
How to manage energy bills more effectively? First, you need to research the niche. This will enable you to identify the issues with the current pricing policy, determine the best tariffs from energy suppliers, and create a strategy for managing the company’s service costs.
It is worth conducting comprehensive analytics, collecting as much information as possible, including your competitors’ advantages and disadvantages, your partners’ opportunities, and customers’ needs. This will become the foundation for building a utility expense reduction mechanism.
A unique value proposition that takes into account the needs and solves the pains of the customer
A UVP – unique value proposition. This is, first and foremost, personalised utility cost management, calculated according to the needs of each customer.
- In other words, you have to offer exactly what interests the end customer, cover their production capacities, and so on. Whether independently or with partners – this is a secondary issue. The main thing is to outweigh the competitors’ offer, even by lowering the cost of services. Not at a loss to yourself, but within reasonable limits.
In fact, for this, you will need two components: besides insights based on market analysis, you need a tech solution to support the cost reduction of your core activities. And these are customer management and billing, in the first place.
Automation of accounting and billing
How to manage energy bills effectively by creating valuable offers? Manually for each client? Possible, but the costs for each calculation will exceed the benefits of a favourable offer.
Automation of accounting and tariff calculation, billing of customers using systems from MaxBill is the optimal solution for a utility company. And here’s why:
- Automatic data collection from all critical sources in real-time. This means reacting to all internal, external, and overall market factors and pricing according to reality.
- Accuracy of accounting and data structuring. For example, separating your own and your partner’s energy resources, whose end customer is your client.
- Automation of settlement operations. Your client receives an invoice and pays it. The received funds are distributed instantly and go directly to you, your partners, contractors, and conditional 3PL providers specialising in the transportation of energy resources.
Built-in or external CRM, synchronisation with ERP, other accounting packages, payment systems and gateways, banking APIs – this is only a small part of the advantages of utility cost management systems. And an element of a much broader strategy for providing energy services to B2B clients.
Utility expense reduction strategies
How to manage energy bills in such a way as to reduce the cost of energy resources and their price for end customers? Simply focus on the goal and optimise the company’s operations according to the following algorithm:
- Focus on purchasing energy resources at the most favourable tariffs. At Maxbill, we offer an AI Quote service to assess energy procurement offers and pick the most convenient one, based on quotes released.
- Ensure your own energy independence and at least operational (technical) expenses.
- Build a high-quality digital (cloud) infrastructure for resource and operations management.
- Reduce enterprise maintenance costs, even at the expense of jobs, if there are processes that can be automated.
- Develop a unique value proposition based on customer requests and typical problems.
The key in this strategy is quality software for utility cost management and utility expense reduction.
Related:
How MaxBill dynamic energy contract management helps energy companies cut costs and boost margins.
Seven red flags for utilities to switch to a better and more agile billing solution.
How MaxBill empowers utility companies to cut costs
The MaxBill team provides companies with cloud-based or hybrid software for managing contracts, billing, payments, and customer relationships (CRM).
MaxBill modern billing and CIS help utilities cut costs via hyperautomation, AI-powered solutions for debt and churn prediction, and AI self-care portal.
The new-gen AI billing and product catalog delivers a new level of capacities around product and service roll-out, market expansion and compliance. Now, configurations are done in clicks and product launches – in minutes.
So with such solutions, kiss goodbye to manually calculate tariffs, issue invoices, or distribute payments between your own and partner accounts. Instead, you get ops excellence and capacities to grow, compete, and thrive.
Ready to transform your utility business? Entrust this task to experts in utility expense reduction – the MaxBill team!
