Data quality & why it matters
Data quality and why it matters
Do you validate the quality and accuracy of your utility invoices and meter data?
It’s an alarming fact, but many businesses place far too much trust in that the utility providers or data collectors’ data is correct and there are no mistakes.
New suppliers will often request your historic half-hourly data as a reference for how they will price your new utility contract, so wrong data can have an impact on not only your ongoing billing but your new contract rates.
Poor quality utility data can have a massive impact on your business if it’s not been identified or rectified, estimates suggest that between 2% and 6% of utility bills contain errors, and suppliers are often unable to correct or identify these themselves. It’s, therefore, so important for customers to take responsibility for their own data quality.
Utility billing errors
These can largely fall into two categories: consumption and contractual, for this blog we’re going to focus on half-hourly data (interval data), so this would fall under consumption
Half-hourly data
Accurate half-hourly data delivers tons of benefits for managing energy, and whilst there are more meters available that can deliver this than ever before, this grants new challenges, not only in how to manage the ever-increasing large amounts of data but how good it is since most of it is hardly ever checked for data quality. Normally received in spreadsheet format, this is unwieldy and not ideal for identifying errors.
However, thanks to a modern database design and cloud technology, large volumes of half-hourly data can be stored and accessed with ease. At Thermatic Energy Services we receive customer data for thousands of meters on a daily basis in a multitude of different formats.
Our software can swiftly analyse huge quantities of data in seconds to highlight errors, and our data quality dashboards display the results in an easily digestible format that suits the client’s requirement.
The benefits of more accurate half-hourly data:
- Confidence in results and decisions based on the data
- Timely, accurate, financial accruals
- Enhanced bill validation
- Identification of anomalies between “settled” and “unsettled” data
- Rapid identification of excess consumption and “suspect” (out of tolerance) readings
- Improved tenant recharge invoices with no credits and rebills
About Thermatic Energy Services
We work with end-user clients to help them achieve their energy management targets. Our main focus is giving our customers visibility to their systems and data to allow them to make actionable decisions to reduce their energy consumption, improve their building operation and achieve their sustainability targets.
