Month-end meter-read close: a checklist for office technology dealers

In our experience, a billing-queue warning is easy to click past when the invoices still have to go out anyway. That’s the part of month-end that worries me, not the mechanics of it.

The close runs through four tabs

e-automate runs contract billing through four stops: Contracts, Billing queue, Ready to invoice/propose, Invoices/Proposals. When you drop contracts into the Billing queue tab, e-automate checks whether everything it needs is actually there, and it hands out a Validated status once it is. Missing cycles, suspect meters, missing meters, all of it surfaces here before an invoice ever gets created. A contract that isn’t validated isn’t allowed onto the Ready to invoice/propose tab, where you can run a Prebilling Audit Detail report before a single invoice exists. Under deadline pressure, it’s tempting to skip that audit. Don’t.

The checklist

1. Start the reading requests before the cycle ends. e-automate’s own example: a five-day request task on a September 15 to October 14 overage period starts sending on October 9. Set your lead time to match how long readings actually take to come back for your customers, whatever that turns out to be.
2. Confirm your billing meter tolerance window before you’re mid-queue on a deadline. ECI’s example: a 10-day tolerance on both sides of an 8/15 to 9/14 cycle accepts a beginning meter dated 8/5 to 8/25 and an ending meter dated 9/4 to 9/24. If your team doesn’t know that window, they can’t tell a real problem from a meter that’s simply a few days early.
3. Read the specific warning before you override it. e-automate doesn’t hand you one generic “meter issue” flag, it names it: begin meter greater than end meter, begin meter the same as the end meter, begin or end meter a web-suspect reading, meter usage over the average by more than your set percentage, a missing base or overage cycle. For the begin-meter-equals-end-meter warning specifically, ECI says the cause is usually a billing meter tolerance set too high, and the fix is adjusting that tolerance, not chasing down a bad reading.
4. Pull the billing meter audit report the moment the queue opens. It lists every piece of metered equipment sitting in the queue with a missing meter, sortable by contact, customer, contract or equipment number, giving the team one list to work.
5. Decide, before the queue fills up, what happens to a cycle you can’t close this month. Removing the overage just defers it. The cycle stays open at its current date, and assuming a monthly contract, if you don’t close it this cycle, next month’s queue puts the new base charge in the queue right alongside this month’s still-unbilled overage. Bulk estimating instead needs both the contract configured to allow meter estimation and a lookback window for valid history, and ECI’s own suggested best-practice values are 30 days minimum, 90 preferred, 180 maximum.
6. Run the audit before you create a single invoice. The Prebilling Audit Detail report on the Ready to invoice/propose tab lets you review every charge, overage, tax and total before you generate anything a customer sees.

Where the review actually happens

Automated meter collection can cut down the manual entry that reaches the queue at all. Devices on FMAudit sync their meters into e-automate on their own. Network-related issues can cause that kind of connection to go stale, though, and a Business Technology Association dealer Q&A on the problem turned up a range of responses: one dealer reported switching monitoring tools and seeing fewer device-reporting issues since, and another was weighing whether to place small devices with data collection agents installed on customers’ networks. That second dealer said that where customers would not allow it, the dealership was considering a collection fee and falling back on a delivery driver and the technicians to gather the readings by hand.

In Auralis’s workflow, a reading that comes in outside the dealer-set threshold goes to a person for review before it posts, instead of posting on its own. The keystrokes go away, and the call on what gets billed stays with your team.

Book a 30-minute walkthrough on your own meter reads: auralis.ai/demo/

Sources

• ECI, e-automate online help (v250): Billing Contracts, Additional Info - Contract Billing Warnings, Setting Service Contract Options, Configuring Meter Reading Requests, Integrating FMAudit with E-automate.
• Brent Hoskins (comp.), Managing Stale DCAs: How do dealers keep their devices reporting?, Dealers Helping Dealers, Office Technology magazine (Business Technology Association), Nov 2022.
• Auralis internal.