Budget and Financial Management

To assist our clients with financial planning, Advantage IQ offers a standard budget and an enhanced variance analysis service that yields essential information to help drive decisions.

Our budget development process leverages the Facility IQ database, our client’s billing history, and our knowledge of planned rate changes. The result is an annual and monthly electric and/or gas service budget for usage and spend that can include your reporting structure such as regions and/or divisions. Included in the budget report is a variance report that shows actual costs against budget.

To understand the root causes of key departures from budget, an enhanced service provides a monthly variance analysis, which can be provided to highlight and explain what caused deviations. Budget variances can be caused by utility billing cycles/missing bills; pricing changes; unusual energy consumption or trends; and site additions, closes or changes.

The budget uses normalized billing data and represents costs that you would expect to incur during the billing periods (normalized to calendar months or fiscal periods) as opposed to costs that are incurred when bills are paid (cash flow).

Advantage IQ can increase the accuracy of your budget with our optional capability to weather-normalize energy use to the 30-year norm.

Because of billing cycles, it typically takes at least 40 days beyond the end of a month to get that month’s budget variance. For clients that need variance analysis closer to “real-time” we can incorporate “spin-up” (missing bill estimation) services to shorten the delivery cycle.

Beyond budget and variance services, Advantage IQ also offers a series of custom reports and services. These include, but are not limited to:

• Use and cost benchmarking/performance: Creating reports that allow easy comparison between/among sites.
• Weather Variance Analysis: Explain what portion of costs are attributed to changes in weather.
• Quarterly or other periodic reforecast: incorporate permanent usage or pricing changes.
• GL Alignment: Create budget reports that easily reconcile with/ import into client GL/Accounting systems.
• History collection for budget implementation: New clients without 12 months history can be offered services to collect specific history.