Rising energy costs would have been enough to make tracking utility data more important for your organization. But with sustainability being more of a priority and ESG (environment, social, and governance) requirements affecting a company’s value to investors, utility data management is becoming a crucial part of what you do.

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If you’ve had to collect or report on that data, you know it comes with headaches and serious challenges. Here they are in detail—and a solution that’ll help you blow right past them.

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The 7 biggest utility data management challenges

Just like with any other kind of data, utility data needs to be collected, cleaned, processed, and deployed in other platforms and reports. These challenges take up a whole new form with utility data.

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Getting the data

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Utility data can be notoriously difficult to gather since the companies that manage utility services are rarely the most tech-minded. When was the last time you were impressed with a platform when paying your own utility bills?

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Unlike financial, employment, and other types of data, utility data is siloed within these platforms, meaning you can’t access it with the integration tools you’d usually turn to. That makes just getting the data you need more complicated.

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Often, the only way to get the utility data you need is to manually access and download invoices for each utility. When you need to report for an entire fiscal year, that becomes a serious undertaking, especially if your organization owns or leases multiple buildings. Some utility providers might allow you to export data as CSVs or similar files, but even integrating that into your reporting tools will take some significant manual work.

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Standardizing data across sources

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Your utility providers have no obligation to make the data they provide match any sort of standard followed by another service or in another jurisdiction. Your heating and water consumption data might look completely different, for example, or an electric bill in one city might be completely different than the same bill in another.

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If you’re manually processing this data as part of your ESG or sustainability reporting requirements, it will take your team more time to properly analyze everything without missing any important information. If you’re using tools like OCR data extraction—which scans documents to pull relevant information—these changing standards will force you to manually review outputs more than you’d usually need to.

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Loading data into your reporting tools

You likely have several systems in place for cleaning, processing, and loading data into reporting and analysis tools. But while you’ve established this for most of the data your processes rely on, have you done the same for utility data?

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Most companies haven’t.

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That means any process that depends on that data takes longer, has a greater potential for human error, and needs to be reviewed more extensively. Utility data might need to be transformed quite a bit before it’ll be compatible with your existing processes—and most of that will be done manually.

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Managing languages and currencies

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Having to deal with multiple currencies in any accounting or reporting capacity can be difficult. The same is true for utility data management.

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Additionally, companies with operations spanning multiple countries might need to process utility data in completely different languages on top of managing multiple currencies. While you might already have the accounting processes needed to manage currency changes, translation is yet another hurdle to hop over when managing this kind of data.

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There’s one other element unique to utility data, though. Units. While electricity bills use KW/h (kilowatt per hour) to track consumption, a water bill might use cubic meters while other, more niche utilities use completely different units (like gallons for propane). That can make reporting and adhering to ESG standards more complicated.

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Keeping data fresh

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Some data only needs to be reviewed once a quarter or once per fiscal year. With data sources that automatically push the information you need to reports and tools you use daily, you don’t even have to worry about these reviews; you’ll have up-to-date data exactly when you need it. That’s usually not the case with utility data.

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Because it’s usually collected manually—and sourced from multiple platforms—any time that data needs refreshing, you’re looking at a long process. All the headaches that come with refreshing data for important reports are magnified for utility data.

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Human error

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Human error is a factor in every data management process, no matter how automated it is. But when you’re dealing with relatively new data sources and more manual processes, the risk of human error compounds.

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Most organizations are still figuring out how to integrate utility data into their reporting, meaning there are plenty of new errors to discover, patch, and account for. And because there are few automated tools for processing utility data, more manual entry and review is required, which creates more risk.

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With ESG requirements becoming more common—and having more of an impact on your company’s bottom line—the cost of these errors is growing.

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Auditability

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Mandatory reporting and compliance requirements are only going to keep growing, and more of this will involve utility data as entire industries shift to more sustainable energy- and resource-consumption methods. Reports involving utility data aren't just used for internal processes; they'll be examined closely by external groups like government agencies and other regulatory bodies.

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Anything you do involving utility data needs to be auditable, the same way your financials are. If you're doing everything manually—which most organizations are—that essentially doubles your workload.

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How to solve these problems

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When it comes to just about any other data source, you’re used to seeing information move seamlessly toward the platforms you need it in. Whether it’s financial information or employment data, there’s no shortage of solutions built specifically to make it portable.

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But with utility data, you’re either stuck manually downloading and uploading statements or relying on a utility company’s proprietary platform—which can often be cumbersome to use. That means any time you need to report on energy consumption and other utilities, whether for internal processes or to meet ESG standards, you need to factor in a ton of manual work.

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That’s where Deck comes in.

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Deck connects alternative data sources—like utility data—with the platforms you use every day, just like you’d expect with more standard data sources. Use a simple, no-code dashboard that links directly to utility accounts and automates the capture of standardized utility spending and consumption data. From there, exports and APIs allow you to push this data to essential platforms.

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Get standardized, auditable information at your fingertips, even for utility data management.

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Want to see what this looks like in action? Get an instant demo here.

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Make utility data useful

Utility data is only going to become more essential as the need for better energy efficiency spreads and regulatory requirements increase. However, this data can be notoriously difficult to collect, clean, and process. As long as you go into it with the challenges above in mind, you can start finding solutions that will make them a thing of the past.

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See why Deck should be one of these solutions.

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