An automated utilities monitoring service has been developed by Total Utilities to assist High Schools and Colleges spending more than $100,000/year on electricity, gas or computing and telecoms.

The new monitoring service will simplify financial management of utilities by generating and displaying usage reports to help identify trends.  This will allow School Business Managers to quickly pinpoint any issues and will make investment and strategy decision-making more accurate, according to Mike Ette of Total Utilities.

“Many High Schools and Colleges struggle with the financial management of their utilities,” said Mike.  “It’s difficult to know if you are getting value from these services if they are not monitored and measured.  Once Business Managers can identify trends, it becomes easy to ask key questions like – is the usage increase in line with changes in the school? Or – nothing has changed so why is usage going up?”

Until recently, utilities monitoring has predominantly been a manual process focused on exception reporting. Having automated this process Total Utilities is now able to deliver an accurate and superior service, with better cost and trend reporting, and a clearer basis for forecasting budgets.

Total Utilities manages utility contracts on behalf of education sector and business customers to the value of $385 million per year.  Over the last 15 years Total Utilities has worked closely with clients to develop a best-practice approach for utilities procurement, monitoring, and management.