Why are my PSE&G electric payments labeled as “Patel Brother’s LLC”?

All company utility credentials and sites are already enrolled in the Engie Insight platform, may we enroll with Arcadia by granting access to the Engie Insight portal or must we submit individual credential access for each distinct utility and property?

Observations

Sometimes our customers may not be capable of presenting their utility expenses and invoices directly. This could be due to corporate infrastructure or contractual obligations among other reasons.

Customers may be liable for utility expenses via third parties rather than through their regional utilities themselves. Alternatively, third party service partners often enroll Arcadia customers who only grant access to third party data platforms (utility bill management platforms) and do not grant direct access to the utilities themselves– this is an undesirable outcome. These scenarios impose limitations on the Plug service as the direct data is always ideal.

The most prevalent case of indirect billing involves business enterprises leasing significant portions of the property where they operate. Under these arrangements, the lessee receives utility expense invoices from the property manager, not from the regional utility. For purposes of Arcadia data services, these documents are considered INDIRECT sources.

As mentioned above, the second most common scenario relates to customers or partners who contract with Arcadia while already being under a service agreement with another data service provider who controls access to the Arcadia customer’s utility invoice sources. This places a vendor between the Arcadia Connect service and the customer’s utility data. When the pre-existing vendor relationships can be bypassed, allowing us to integrate with the regional utility data sources as usual, there are no negative impacts or limitations on the data integrity. However, in circumstances where we must extract data from the vendor rather than the originating utility, we considers these sources as INDIRECT. These sources are often called “leased assets”.

Indirect Sources Standard

Data acquisition and extraction depend upon the integrity of the data source. Our source integrations are dependent upon official, billing-grade documents and transactions. Whenever our access to the regional utility is impeded, the data integrity is equally impeded.

Provider Identity

When a customer receives a tenant utility invoice (also known as a leased asset) instead of the official utility invoice, the recognized data provider is the Landlord and not the regional utility responsible for the property point-of-delivery.

For example, a customer whose business is located in a mixed-use property in Los Angeles and is based in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) service territory. The customer receives an electric billing invoice from “Golden Coast Realty” and not from LADWP directly. The electric service from LADWP is associated with Golden Coast Realty, and then Golden Coast Realty prorates and distributes those charges out to their tenants respectively. Therefore, whenever we process these documents, the tenant electric accounts are attributed to Golden Coast Realty as INDIRECT sources. The enrolled accounts and statements are not considered to be LADWP accounts or invoices. For purposes of carbon accounting, Arcadia customers may need to attribute this Golden Coast Realty statement to LADWP’s service territory. To achieve this, customers would need to apply custom data attributes to the relevant site or meter.

Similarly, when a customer has been onboarded via a third party data service instead of the official utility E-billing credentials, then the recognized data provider must be the data provider platform and not the regional utility responsible for the property point-of-delivery.

For example, a customer whose business is located in Los Angeles and is based in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) service territory receives an electric billing invoice from LADWP. Because this customer is contracted with “OneSource Utility Expense Platform”, all of their account inventory has been onboarded by granting Arcadia access to the ‘OneSource Utility Expense Platform’. This is not the preferred method of enrollment and all customers are encouraged to grant access via utility credentials during enrollment. The electric service from LADWP is therefore acquired by integrating with the ‘OneSource Utility Expense Platform’ and may not be considered as an LADWP invoice. As mentioned above, when the third party vendor relationships can be bypassed, allowing us to integrate with the regional utility data sources as usual, there are no negative impacts or limitations on the data integrity.

However, in circumstances where we must extract data from the ‘OneSource Utility Expense Platform’ (and not the originating utility), we consider these sources to be INDIRECT. More specifically, if our integration allows us to acquire the original, official, complete, E-bill, as published by LADWP, then the integration with “OneSource Utility Expense Platform” will not impose any limitations. The most common result of asking us to integrate with any third party platform is that the invoice sources are interpretations and rendering of the original LADWP invoice into a bitmap, image, HTML, JSON, or other text form and not the original E-bill as published by LADWP.

Therefore, whenever we process these documents, the electric accounts are attributed to ‘OneSource Utility Expense Platform’ as INDIRECT sources. The enrolled accounts and statements are not considered to be LADWP accounts or invoices. For purposes of carbon accounting, customers may need to attribute this ‘OneSource Utility Expense Platform’ statement to LADWP’s service territory. To achieve this, customers would need to apply custom data attributes to the relevant site or meter. For these reasons, we strongly encourage all partners and customers to grant access via utility credentials or files access to the full, official E-bill documents during enrollment.

More Frequently Asked Questions

Q: My landlord shares the original LADWP E-bill with my Accounts Payable (AP) group and then performs a simple mark-up operation that requests our business pay 25% of the full LADWP amount due. Does this mean that Arcadia will recognize the document as an official LADWP invoice and not impose the INDIRECT status?

The case described above is an INDIRECT case. The provider will be designated as your landlord and not as LADWP. If we process an original utility E-bill, it must be processed completely, without any other attachments, without any secondary mark-up, and without any secondary business rule interpretations required.

Q: My business uses a utility bill management online system. We have been assured by the UBM vendor that they will make every possible effort to preserve the original E-bills and post the full PDF files within their portal. In certain situations, however, (the utility bill was late or the utility issued a re-bill or unknown format) the UBM site is required to present an estimation or an HTML version of the original. Will these accounts and statements be considered as INDIRECT sources by Arcadia?

If during the enrollment of each account, we were able to confirm an original, complete E-bill as the source then the respective account will not be considered INDIRECT because the source files were official. However, the instant that we detect an alternate format, whether an estimation or an HTML version of the original, those sources will be rejected. We will inform the customer that INDIRECT sources are polluting the account and we will have to reject the sources or present them as sources from the UBM where the UBM is the provider and not the utility. This will also cause the enrolled account to have to be re-provisionsed as it is now associated with both LADWP for example and the UBM as provider.

Conclusion

The utility billing infrastructure of businesses often involves indirect invoicing from property managers, data centers, or external data service providers, which can impair the integrity of energy and commodity data. Ideally, Arcadia prefers to extract all information directly from regional utilities for the most accurate results. While indirect data management is unavoidable in some cases, compensating for such source deficiencies and making the necessary enhancement is an imperfect process. Therefore, understanding the ultimate source of invoice data and appropriately segmenting or flagging such transactions grants a more accurate and realistic expectation of what can be achieved in each respective scenario.