Run a Calculation to Match a Bill

Match a Customer’s Utility Bill

The first step for many Arcadia Signal customers is to reproduce one or more of their customers' historical bills. By successfully matching your customer’s bill, you can be confident you have their usage and important billing attributes correct when presenting historical cost data. And when you move on to running what-if calculations, you’ll know you have successfully defined the customer and their baseline usage.

In this How-To, we recommend a simple three-step process to calculate and match a bill:

Select the correct Tariff, and optionally the tariff properties too.
Make a Bill Match Calculate Call.
Using the results that came back, calibrate and re-run your Calculate call as needed.

Typically, steps 1 and 3 take longer when provisioning a site (e.g., the first bill) than they do for subsequent bills. If you are matching multiple bills at once, we recommend doing them in chronological order.

Select the Correct Tariff

It’s key that you run the calculation against the right tariff! We have a whole separate How-To on that. See the "Which tariff is my customer on?" recipe and then come back here!

How to make the Bill Match Calculate Call

Let’s jump straight in with an example of how to make a call. It’s the best way to explain what to do. Here we are using our On-Demand Cost Calculator with specific input parameters that allow us to match a bill.

View an example in this recipe:

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Match a Bill

Open Recipe

Here's a breakdown of the request available in the recipe above:

Request Property...	Which Denotes...	Details on How to Set it
`masterTariffId`	ID of the tariff you are using in the calculation	Read [Pick the Right Tariff][selecting_the_right_utility_and_tariff].
`fromDateTime`, `toDateTime`	Designates the range of the calculation	Be careful with the date range of the calculation since each utility has different rules with the dates printed on the bill. The dates could refer to the start of the day or the end of the day. If it’s available, we recommend referring to the number of billing days listed on the bill to confirm the date range.
`billingPeriod`	This is a calc for one billing period	Set to true as this calculation should be treated as a billing period. This makes sure that rates that apply to one billing period are pro-rated correctly (particularly demand and fixed charges).
`minimums`	Whether to consider minimum charges as part of the calculation	For most bill match use-cases, you probably want this value to be true. When true, the utility’s minimum charges will be invoked when the bill’s charges are not sufficient to exceed the minimum charges. When a minimum charge is invoked in the calculation, the `assumptions` section of the response will have `"keyName": "minimum"` with a `dataValue` of `true`.
`expected`	Pass in what you expected for costs and/or usage	Optional to set expectations on calculation results to enable accuracy validation. The expected values you pass have no impact on the calculation. You can pass through the expected `totalCost`, which is the sum of the subtotal and taxes. You can also pass through the expected total consumption value (`kWh`) and the highest demand value (`kW`).

Passing in the Usage Values from the Bill

When you are working from a utility bill, it will likely include the customer’s consumption (kWh) and peak demand (kW or kVA) values for the billing period. To the extent that the tariff includes rates that vary by season or Time of Use (TOU), the kWh and kW values might be correspondingly broken out. Whatever the granularity of usage data, you will want to use it in your on-demand calculation to get the best match accuracy.

For each usage input, you will want to create an object in the propertyInputs. For example, if you have a bill that looks like this:

Customer Bill - 11/15/2015 to 12/17/2015 (32 Billing Days)
Energy Charge	154,324 kWh	$0.10/kWh	$15,