Having a good handle on your energy budget is crucial for any business. Whether your business is reliant on computers, machinery or anything in between, energy is essential and you must therefore have a thorough understanding of your budget.
Political uncertainty, rising prices and changes to non-commodity elements of your bill are all pushing the cost of energy steadily upward. With businesses energy spend mounting, budgeting is becoming more and more complex, meaning better energy management is essential.
Here are some key steps to take in order to have a good grip on your energy budget.
Understand your portfolio
Keeping track of your business’ energy spend can be tricky and this is further complicated for larger businesses who have various sites, supply chains and energy suppliers to juggle. It is very important to store historic utility bills, but even if this is achieved often there is still poor understanding of company-wide usage, costs and budget.
To develop an energy budget, your business must have all the relevant data to hand, but this can be an extremely time consuming and complicated undertaking. It may be helpful to have a trusted energy partner on board, in order to assist with developing an accurate and up to date understanding of your data.
Once all the relevant data is compiled you can then better understand your energy spend and monitor this to estimate your annual budget.
Budgeting
Ensuring that your energy budget is accurate is a basic need for any business and its clients. However, they can become more complex especially with flexible energy contracts in place and the increase in additional non-commodity costs. Forecasting models for each clients needs can be challenging but it’s important to ensure that all data is collected, and your budget takes all factors into account.
Gone are the days of spreadsheets to better manage your energy budget. Energy managers need the flexibility to build any type of budget forecast no matter what type of contract the client has. Our Budgets App can allow you to feed in your clients contract information and select which future commodity models you’d like to use which then generates a budget for the next two to five years.
Energy management software
Once your budget has been set up you will need to continuously monitor your energy usage against your actual energy spend and then see whether it matches up with your budget. Energy management software can help you monitor and manage all your utilities, making it easier to identify any waste or overspend and track any savings made. It can then also help you to pinpoint which elements of your business aren’t matching up with your budget.
If you find your spend is moving away from your budget, it may be helpful to look at specific areas of your usage to identify specific problems. Being able to split your portfolio into more manageable chunks in this way allows for more awareness and specific reactive activities to tackle problem areas.
Why not take a look at our energy management hub, Unify and see how it can help your business with energy management, procurement and accounting needs?
Finding the right energy management software
SystemsLink’s’ energy management software can support your business and client’s energy management needs. From understanding energy usage to monitoring usage in order to be armed with the most up to date and useful data possible.
To learn more about how to get a better grip on your energy budget, get in touch with our experts today by contacting us at sales@systems-link.com.
