The ROI of EnergyCAP Utility Management

Executive summary

As organizations manage their building portfolio, juggle energy data, and work to hit sustainability goals, getting the most out of their energy management tools is key. EnergyCAP simplifies complex energy and sustainability data in a single source of truth, cutting costs and energy use in the process. We hear from customers every day who are ditching spreadsheets and manual processes, making more informed choices, and saving big–whether that’s through lower energy bills, spotting billing errors, or fixing issues with their buildings.

To measure and validate this impact we ran a survey with customers from a broad range of industries, asking them to share whether, and how much, they’ve saved in costs and time since they began using EnergyCAP Utility Management™ (EUM). Sharing the survey results is our way of showing you just how much value EnergyCAP brings to the table with a quick ROI, hefty cost savings, and more time on your hands.

Key findings

After implementing EnergyCAP Utility Management, you can expect to:

• see an ROI in 2.6 years, though nearly 1/4 see that ROI in 1 year or less.
• save 10% or more year-over-year on total utility bill spend.
• have 4.7% of utility bills flagged every month with actionable issues or errors you can resolve to save cost.
• save more than 20 hours of employee time per month.
• eliminate manual processes across your organization.

Methodology

The ROI of EnergyCAP Utility Management survey was open to all current EUM customers. If there were multiple responses from a single organization, additional responses were:

Excluded from the results if all submitted responses were identical.

The least favorable response was used if submitted responses differed (e.g. if one participant reported an ROI of 0–1 years, and another participant from the same organization reported an ROI of 2–3 years, the ROI for that organization was reported in the survey as 2–3 years.)

We crunched some numbers from our survey to provide clear benchmarks and takeaways in this eBook. Average, or mean, values are denoted with an * or clearly stated to be the average result. All other results are exactly what customers reported, transcribed directly into this eBook.

Taking action

• 4.7% of customer bills* are flagged in EnergyCAP Utility Management every month with actionable issues or errors they can resolve to save cost.
• More than 1 in 7 customers see 10% or more of their bills flagged with actionable issues every single month.

What we think
EnergyCAP Utility Management automatically audits every utility bill entered into the platform. Bill flags point you directly to any areas of concern, helping you identify and resolve issues quickly–usually before the bill is even paid. Discovering things like billing errors, unusual use patterns, or unexpected costs puts money back in your pocket and towards your bottom line. Adding notes and assigning actions to others keeps everything in your single source of truth.

The bottom line
Every bill issue flagged by EnergyCAP Utility Management is an opportunity to cut costs, solve issues in your buildings, and save time.

Work smarter with money-saving features

We asked customers which features in EnergyCAP Utility Management saved the most time and cost for their organization. Effectively every area of the platform was praised in their responses, but we’re whittling it down to the top 6 to share in this report.

• Reports and dashboards
  EnergyCAP streamlines energy and sustainability data analysis with customizable dashboards and reports. Skip manual data entry and reporting—focus on insights. Then share with your organization, the public, or external stakeholders by embedding into a website or auto-sending reports. No more creating graphs in Excel, no more fetching data, and no more report writing.
• Cost avoidance
  One of biggest barriers to implementing energy projects is not knowing how much you’ve actually conserved. Cost avoidance (also called Measurement and Verification) provides a direct and accurate estimate of exactly that, even through commodity price increases, weather changes, and varying billing periods. You get credit for all the changes you’ve made, and stakeholders can see the proof in dollars and cents.
• Bill flags
  Given that 98% of our customers take action every single month on bills flagged by EUM, it’s no surprise that this feature made the list. Bill audits are powerful tools that examine utility bill data for accuracy and unusual patterns of use or cost, and automatically flag potential problems for review. Find billing and usage issues without having to play hide-and-seek.
• Excel and other workbook exports
  Want to download the data behind your favorite charts, graphs, and reports? It’s a click away. The accounting department needs to slice-and-dice different data than building management? Everyone can download the data they need into common formats, or connect directly to your favorite business intelligence applications with EnergyCAP Report Designer BI.
• Energy saving projects
  EUM’s project tracking feature reports energy and cost savings from your energy management projects. Input your project information, and the tracking feature automatically charts projects on EnergyCAP’s Energy Use Intensity (EUI) graph. Everything stays in your single source of truth, and impacts get quantified and easily reported.
• Benchmarking
  Compare your buildings apples-to-apples to find potential issues like leaks or theft, choose where energy projects should be implemented, and flag your rock-star, energy-conserving buildings to duplicate success. Or simplify submittals to ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager® with in-platform submittals that avoid double entry.

The bottom line

Every single feature in EUM is designed to save cost, save time, reduce energy usage, eliminate errors, or build insights. No two organizations, or industries, are going to find those savings through exactly the same methods (except you Government, Higher Education, and K-12–we see your collective obsession with Reports and Dashboards), but the good news is you don’t have to choose. EnergyCAP Utility Management democratizes access to energy information across teams, facilitating in-depth analysis and easily delivering actionable insights without manual work.

Time and cost savings

The vast majority of respondents saved time on tasks that used to be done manually once they began using EnergyCAP Utility Management.

Let’s dig a little deeper and quantify that savings.

• Customers save an average of 23 hours of employee time per month after implementing EnergyCAP Utility Management, at least $16,000A USD of salaried time a year.
• Subscribing to EnergyCAP Bill CAPture services, where we do all the work of entering utility bill data for you, supercharges this number. Bill CAPture customers save up to 37 hours a month on average.
• 1 in 12 customers saves more than 60 hours of employee time per month with EnergyCAP Utility Management–more than $45,000A USD annually.

Utility bill savings

• More than half of customers save 10% or more year-over-year (YoY) on the total cost of their utility bills after implementing EnergyCAP Utility Management.
• The total average YoY utility bill savings for all respondents was 7.5%.

What we think
It’s no wonder organizations who use EnergyCAP Utility Management collectively saw bill savings of more than $8 Billion^B in 2023. The benefits of lower utility bills costs and fewer employee tasks are self-evident—they free up valuable resources for other areas of your business. Imagine what your employees can accomplish with more than 11 weeks of newly available time, or where you might invest the 10% you save on utility bills, after you’ve implemented EnergyCAP Utility Management and handed off manual data entry to us with Bill CAPture services.

The bottom line
EnergyCAP Utility Management measurably saves significant amounts of money—through employee time spent elsewhere, in lower utility bills costs, and as building and billing issues are corrected.

Ahead of the pack

The Berkeley National Lab found that implementing an energy management information system leads to annual energy cost savings of around 3%. This figure has become an industry standard that many providers hang their hat on. EnergyCAP is thrilled that the average savings reported by our customers far outstrips this number.

• Average YoY utility bill savings with EnergyCAP Utility Management is 7.5%—2.5x greater than other energy management software solutions.

Go big with Bill CAPture

About half of survey respondents were also Bill CAPture subscribers. Unsurprisingly, passing off manual utility bill data entry to the experts at EnergyCAP saves these organizations significant amounts of time and cost, but even we’re surprised at just how big the impact is.

• Customers with Bill CAPture services have up to 4X the number of bills* with actionable issues or errors flagged each month vs those without Bill CAPture.
• Adding Bill CAPture services saves 30+ additional hours* of employee time every single month. This jumps to more than 60 hours for 1 in 7 customers with Bill CAPture services.

What we think
Accurate utility bill accounting and effective energy management starts with capturing complete utility bill data. Implementing EUM as your energy and utility management platform establishes a single source of truth for this data, resulting in enormous time and cost savings. Eliminating manual utility bill data entry amplifies all of those efforts–freeing up even more time and resources, and propelling you closer to lower GHG emissions without your focus having to be on your keyboard.

The bottom line
Every month, Bill CAPture services save up to 5X the amount* of employee time, and result in as much as 4X the number of bills* flagged with actionable issues, over implementing EnergyCAP Utility Management alone.

Return on investment

Drumroll, please. The key question for many organizations weighing whether they should continue to wrangle utility and sustainability data internally through spreadsheets and shared documents, or implement a software like EnergyCAP, is “when will I see a return on my investment?”. When you choose EnergyCAP UtilityManagement, the answer is: much sooner than you might think.

• The overall average ROI for the total cost of EnergyCAP Utility Management is 2.6 years. This includes implementation costs, annual licensing fees, and service subscriptions as applicable—the whole kit and caboodle.
• Nearly 1 in 4 customers see an ROI within a single year.
• Only a small subset of customers took longer than 5 years to see an ROI, and 1/5 of respondents hadn’t been using the platform long enough to tell us.

What we think
Apart from being a single source of truth for your entire organization, a path to data-driven energy decisions, and a holistic energy data reporting tool, EnergyCAP solutions are a sound financial investment. For most customers, the savings generated through EnergyCAP Utility Management will outweigh the implementation and licensing costs within a few short years.

• The bottom line
  You can spend the next few years filling out spreadsheets, trying to keep track of your utility
  data and projects in silos, or you can implement EnergyCAP Utility Management and see the
  cost paid back to you in that same amount of time. Average ROI for the platform is 2.6 years,
  with ¼of customers seeing an ROI within the first year.

What customers had to say

For this section, we left the questions open ended and optional. While we couldn’t include all responses, we’ve listed the most helpful and frequent responses to each question.

What areas of your organization have seen the most savings from utilizing EnergyCAP Utility Management?

• Accounting and finance
• Operations, Engineering, and Maintenance
• Energy Management
• Sustainability team
• Facilities and Public Works
• Administration
• Compliance—using EUM to submit our data to ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager®
• Taxpayers
• The entire school district
• Auditing

Approximately how much cost has been avoided annually by addressing the utility bill issues flagged by EnergyCAP Utility Management?

• 8% of respondents reported $100,000 or more of costs avoided in a single year by addressing utility bill issues flagged in EUM.
• The largest reported cost avoidance by an organization in a single year was $1.5M
• “We do not have a running total of issues flagged and associated costs, but tens of thousands [of dollars]. We have caught water leaks, meter issues, boiler issues, and more.”
• “$500,000”
• “$50,000”
• “$250,000”
• “$20,000–30,000”
• “$50,000–$100,000”
• “$5,000”

How do you save time, energy consumption, or money with EnergyCAP Utility Management?

• “The ability to efficiently track usage is where we find our value. We have found that the ability to run reports showing usage trends makes it easier to communicate with our stakeholders. We are able to show them how specific activities change their utility usage, and communicate with the public regarding our efforts to reduce consumption.”
• “We haven’t had [the platform] long enough to get an idea of savings from actual bills, but the amount of time to review and process our bills each month has been drastically reduced – at least 8 hours a week in data coordination and tracking right away.”
• “Our department has had utility savings every single year since we have implemented EnergyCAP.”
• “EnergyCAP is very successful in finding issues with bills. Often there were financial and use errors that we encountered. Being able to easily assess every bill in one location is a major plus. The ability to avoid human error is an added benefit.”
• “Labor hours – manual bill input has been significantly reduced.”
• “We are able to track our progress in meeting energy conservation goals.”
• “We have been able to identify utility theft and take action to stop the theft.”

Benchmarking

“Benchmarking with ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. We have saved the time it would take to upload information into both platforms”

“We are able to complete our Benchmarking efficiently”

“Our goal is to achieve ENERGY STAR certification for as many buildings as possible. We’ve recently certified 3 new buildings directly through EUM.”

Facilities

• “Knowing what’s happening in our facilities and using that data as actionable intelligence”
• “We are able to catch overwatering much faster and [quickly] fix leaks.”
• “We can spot potential maintenance issues based on unusual usage.”

Notes key

* – The average, or mean, of all survey responses

A – Salary time savings based on the average annual salary of an energy manager, finance manager, and facilities director in the United States as reported by Indeed.com plus average payroll costs

B – Cost avoidance total for all EUM licensed databases from Jan 1–Dec 31, 2023.