On the commercial scale, utilities can be one of the most expensive operating costs for a business. It’s no secret that energy prices have been volatile over the past few years and, despite the growing popularity of natural gas and cheaper energy sources, prices have not decreased significantly at all.
Historically, most people have simply checked their utility and/or supplier invoice every month. While this helps to get an understanding of basic usage and cost, most invoices typically lack any sophisticated reporting to help business owners identify insights, or that there even exists a problem.
The real value of energy data is that it can be used to find opportunities and problems that can have a significant impact on a business’s bottom line. With that said, we’d like to discuss why you should track energy usage for insights about your business.
Why Tracking Energy Usage is Important
Tracking energy usage provides business owners with an understanding of one of the largest cost centers of their business. This is especially imperative for businesses who manage multiple locations in different cities or states. Accounting for all of these different costs and the sheer volume of data can become quite overwhelming and wasteful without a tracking system in place.
Tracking utility data helps business owners compare and contrast cost and usage data across multiple properties and become more proactive in their energy management strategy. With the right system in place, business owners can identify opportunities to reduce their energy consumption while improving operational efficiency. Furthermore, energy tracking software that can pull insights out of the data can help to plan future year consumption, capital investment projects, and guide future deregulated energy contract decisions by actively tracking your utility usage and costs.
Insights Not Just Data
At Albireo, we believe there is no shortage of reasons why a business owner ought to monitor their energy, but we feel the key is finding insights, versus just monitoring data. Data can be useful if its actionable and able to be leveraged. That is why we made tracking energy usage easy, intuitive, and actionable.
Instead of just simply displaying your data, we analyze the data and call attention to the most important aspects of that data. We do this by presenting the data as informational insights that business owners can take action on.
Each one of our energy management solutions offers an easy-to-use dashboard that highlights the most important parts of your business’s energy data over the previous tracking period. With this data, businesses compare current trends with historical data to discover areas where efficiencies can be implemented and waste be reduced.
Beyond this, applications, like UtilityModule, take advantage of proprietary logic and algorithms that can assist in energy budget creation based on a number of highly fluctuating variables. Each application is designed to support specific functions of business energy management.
Learn More
Tracking energy usage should be an imperative for any business, large or small. At Albireo, we’ve designed software applications that not only record data but offer insights that can actively reduce waste and improve efficiency. Contact us today to learn how you can track energy usage for business insights!
