Month-end meter-read close: a checklist for office technology dealers

When the invoices have to go out at month-end, that’s exactly when a warning in the billing queue is easiest to click past. Honestly, that worries us a lot more than the mechanics of closing the month do.

How does the close work in e-automate?

e-automate moves contract billing through four tabs: Contracts, Billing queue, Ready to invoice/propose, and Invoices/Proposals. When you drop contracts into the Billing queue, e-automate checks whether everything it needs to bill is actually there, and gives the contract a Validated status once it is. So missing cycles, suspect meters, missing meters, etc., all show up here, before an invoice is even created.

A contract that isn’t validated can’t move to the Ready to invoice/propose tab. That’s also where you can run a Prebilling Audit Detail report before a single invoice exists. Now, when you’re up against the deadline, it’s tempting to skip that audit. Please run it anyway.

The checklist

1. Start the reading requests before the cycle ends. e-automate’s own example is a five-day request task on a September 15 to October 14 overage period, which starts sending on October 9. Set your lead time to however long readings actually take to come back from your customers.
2. Know your billing meter tolerance window before you’re mid-queue. For example, ECI says a 10-day tolerance on both sides of an 8/15 to 9/14 cycle accepts a beginning meter dated anywhere from 8/5 to 8/25, and an ending meter from 9/4 to 9/24. If your team doesn’t know that window, they can’t really tell a genuine problem apart from a meter that came in a few days early.
3. Read the specific warning before you override it. e-automate names each one, like begin meter greater than end meter, begin meter the same as end meter, a begin or end meter that’s a web-suspect reading, usage over the average by more than the percentage you set, a missing base or overage cycle, etc. For the begin-meter-equals-end-meter warning, ECI says the cause is usually a billing meter tolerance that’s set too high, so the fix is adjusting the tolerance. We’d check that setting before chasing down the reading.
4. Pull the billing meter audit report as soon as the queue opens. It lists the metered equipment in the queue that has a missing meter, and you can sort it by contact, customer, contract or equipment number, so that the team has one list to work from.
5. Decide what happens to a cycle you can’t close this month, before the queue fills up. Removing the overage just defers it. The cycle stays open at its current date, and assuming a monthly contract, next month’s queue will put the new base charge right next to this month’s unbilled overage. Bulk estimating is the other route. However, it needs the contract set up to allow meter estimation, and a lookback window for valid history. ECI’s suggested best-practice values are 30 days minimum, 90 preferred, and 180 maximum.
6. Run the audit before you create a single invoice. The Prebilling Audit Detail report on the Ready to invoice/propose tab lets you go through every charge, overage, tax and total before anything reaches a customer.

Where does the review actually happen?

Automated meter collection cuts down how much manual entry reaches the queue at all. Devices on FMAudit sync their meters into e-automate by themselves. However, network-related issues can make that kind of connection go stale, and when the Business Technology Association asked dealers about it, the answers were all over the place. One dealer had switched monitoring tools and was seeing fewer device-reporting issues since. Another was weighing small devices with data collection agents installed, placed on customers’ networks, and where customers wouldn’t allow that, was considering a collection fee and having the delivery driver and technicians gather the readings by hand. Which is a lot of effort for a meter read, if you ask us.

With Auralis, a reading that comes in outside the threshold the dealer sets goes to a person to review before it posts. So the team still decides what gets billed, they just do a lot less typing to get there.

Want to see it on your own meter reads? Book a 30-minute walkthrough: auralis.ai/demo/

Sources

• ECI, e-automate online help (v250): Billing Contracts, Additional Info - Contract Billing Warnings, Setting Service Contract Options, Configuring Meter Reading Requests, Integrating FMAudit with E-automate.
• Brent Hoskins (comp.), Managing Stale DCAs: How do dealers keep their devices reporting?, Dealers Helping Dealers, Office Technology magazine (Business Technology Association), Nov 2022.
• Auralis internal.