One-time Impact to Submeter Bill Calculations in EnergyCAP

Thursday, June 3, 2021

In the latest EnergyCAP release (7.13), the chargeback engine logic used to create submeter bills from monthly channels was enhanced to better react to the timestamp of each monthly reading. Readings that occur after noon will result in bill dates that correspond to the following date—this provides a more accurate representation of the billing data and the underlying weather data. These changes are documented in the published EnergyCAP 7.13 Release Notes.

Important Notes for the First Time Running the Chargeback Engine After the Version 7.13 Update
If your monthly readings have timestamps later than noon on the reading date, the chargeback engine may create either a duplicate bill for your prior monthly bill or a one-day gap between bills. Since any readings after noon are now considered to fall on the following date, the chargeback engine may view a prior reading as “new” and create a corresponding bill. For example:

• Monthly readings are recorded at 5:00pm for the time zone of the meter
• Readings exist for April 10, 2021 at 5:00pm and May 10, 2021 at 5:00pm
• The chargeback engine previously created a bill based on these readings that started on April 10 and ended on May 10
• With the updated logic in version 7.13, the chargeback engine interprets the readings differently because they both are after NOON on the date of the reading.
• The chargeback engine will attempt to create a bill with a start date of April 11 and an end date of May 11. Since no existing bill exists for these dates, the chargeback engine will create a second bill for the same April-May readings.

This issue may not affect your database based on your specific reading times, but we wanted to make you aware of the possible issue. This is a one-time issue—all calculations going forward will use the new logic and prevent any duplicate bills or gaps. This change does not impact bill calculations based on interval data that has a frequency less than monthly (e.g., daily, hourly, and 15-minute readings).

If duplicate bills are created in your database, they can be easily deleted/voided from a bill list using the following steps (screenshots included below):

• View bills created by the chargeback engine by navigating to the Chargebacks Module and selecting the Chargeback Log
• Click on the bills created by a specific chargeback run
• From the bill list that displays your chargeback bills, sort by Bill Begin Date to easily select bills to be deleted/voided

If you have any questions, please contact EnergyCAP’s Technical Support team at https://support.energycap.com.

Regards,

Joel Brickell
Assistant Vice President, Client Services
EnergyCAP, LLC