In the past, constructing energy budgets was simple – take last year's cost, add a percentage uplift, and – et voilà, you have next year's budget. Generally, so long as your budget was higher than the year's actual cost, you had no issues. Budgets, however, cannot increase forever, and sooner or later, people ask questions and require detailed information.

Today, your operations, finance, and environmental teams require detailed and accurate energy budgets to work effectively. Moreover, aggregate monthly cost figures are not enough. Your budget needs to break out important data points including projected consumption, commodity prices and costs, non-commodity costs, environmental charges, and taxes. Additionally, your budget needs to be actively reviewed against actual energy invoice data and revised regularly to provide reliable latest estimates (LE) data to all relevant internal teams.

Construct: Build budget using past invoice data, current supply contracts, commodity/non-commodity forecasts, and projected operational variations.

Track: Regularly track budget components against actual invoice data and provide variance reports.

Revise: Periodically review budget against actual data to generate insights – review budget elements and update for the remainder of the budget period.

To transform your budgeting process requires a detailed and accurate historic energy database, knowledge of your current purchasing arrangements and operations, insight into existing and proposed non-commodity charges, and a system to track and report actual invoice data against budgeted costs.

We help organizations through this transformation. With our support, your budgets will be more detailed and accurate. Where you utilize other NUS services (invoicing and data management and energy information systems), we can seamlessly leverage this information and knowledge to streamline the budget construction and tracking process. With our support, your budgets will provide management valuable and actionable insight and make surprises a thing of the past.