Utility Financial Management Overview
Summary
The Utility Financial Management module sits within Envizi's Utility Expense Management solution. The module's purpose is to leverage data management tools and reports to reduce the effort and risk associated with financial management tasks, including reporting of financial budgets and monthly accruals.
Key Benefits
Produce timely and accurate financial performance reporting - with the ability to set and track financial budgets
Improve cash flow planning with accurate accruals - with multiple methodologies for calculating cost accruals
System generated Cost Accruals
Cost Accruals are system-generated estimates for missing cost data. The missing gaps generally represent holes in a historical data set (e.g., missing invoices) or result because the latest invoice is not yet available.
Envizi has the capability to accrue Cost (derived using historical cost data or latest received invoice).
Cost Accruals and Consumption Accruals are part of 'Envizi Foundation Suite'. Please refer to Feature Guide - Accruals for a comprehensive documentation on Cost and Consumption Accruals.
Budget tracking and reporting
Financial budgets for commodities can be uploaded into Envizi, rather than being saved in spreadsheets and distributed amongst different departments.
Uploaded budgets, together with actual utility consumption and cost data, forms a single system of record in Envizi and enables consolidated reporting output for budget tracking purposes.
Envizi provides the capability to compare and track budgets against actual cost expenditure in real time. They can be viewed for the entire organization, or on a portfolio and individual site level. Budgets can also be viewed per commodity, or for the entire site.
Please refer to the Target Tracking for the documentation regarding setting up and tracking budgets in the Envizi system.
Financial Grade Accrual Reports
Financial grade accrual reports typically require relatively complex calculation logic to derive cost accruals, and sometimes use interval metering data and utility tariffs. The system generated cost accruals often would not meet these requirements. In such case, Envizi has the capability to produce fully customized financial grade accrual reports to meet any stringent and complex financial grade accrual reporting requirements.
The output and accrual methodology of the report can be defined and scoped according to individual organization's needs.
If a decision has been made to have Envizi produce such a report, Envizi has a standard process in place to deliver the output - from scoping the requirements to the final release, together with a stringent development and testing process in place behind the scenes. Once the report has been verified and signed off, it will then be made available in the system and it will form part of the UFM module specifically for your organization.