Smart Solutions for Tenant Utility Billing: Boost Efficiency and Profitability
There is an increasing need to be able to present energy and utility consumption for tenants in commercial buildings. Simaxx report designer can be used to create Tenant Billing reports.
What is Tenant Billing?
Tenant billing is the process through which tenants in a commercial or residential building are billed for rent and utilities. Tenant billing is usually handled through a tenant billing software system.
Utility Bills
Utility bills cover utility costs – usually meaning the water bill and energy costs. It may also mean gas, sewage, trash, recycling, heating electricity and any other essential parts of a tenant’s overall utility use.
Tenant Utility Billing
Sending utility bills to tenants in accordance with the tenancy agreement is important. A tenant is responsible for paying utility bills until that tenant moves out. Landlords may be responsible for other costs, but rarely utilities costs.
Why It Matters
Tenants expect to be billed fairly. Even through a third-party billing service, mistakes can be made, and it is not easy to fairly recharge tenants if you are working with incomplete data. The landlords or managing agents are responsible for billing each tenant correctly.
If tenants are being asked to pay too much or not being asked to pay on time, then complaints and unpaid bills can swamp landlords in problems that take a lot of careful financial management to fix. By employing the help of software like Simaxx early, a letting agent can ensure that billing methods are already covered even before the first tenants move in.
Why not use a tenant billing service?
While an outside service can help, it lacks the innate understanding of a rented property that a landlord has. Property agents understand their rental property better than another company can, and bills are often decided based on both power usage and context.
There may be situations where a meter reading needs to be disregarded or a landlord needs to pay a specific electricity bill in a different way. Each landlord is responsible for their utility bills, and taking control of paying them can be an important step to guaranteeing that no mistakes are made.
How Simaxx Can Help
Simaxx can be an invaluable tool for handling utility bills according to your original tenancy agreement. You can use the software to develop your tenant billing service, one that fits in with the exact requirements of your current billing arrangements.
Calculation of Tenant Bills
Tenant bills are often more complex than simply dividing heat, power and water costs between the tenants occupying the property you are responsible for paying. While paying buildings utilities bills equally would be easy, specific tenant meters can sometimes require individual tenant billing.
This means that tenant utility billing can be much more tenants-based, relying on meter readings to determine water and energy costs.
Consistent Presentation of Billing Data
The Heating Networks (Metering & Billing) Regulations – HNMBR, are an essential requirement for property managers with multiple lettings within a commercial building. The regulations require that a communal heating system is correctly metered at the point of usage.
With appropriate metering in place, Simaxx can easily present the data in the form of a tenant billing report. The example shows a mixture of different energy utilities being consumed, each with its own price rate. The reports can be generated for monthly consumption.
Building managers can make the Simaxx data available to the tenants to monitor their consumption during normal operations. Alerts can be created if consumption exceeds threshold values.
Utility Provider Switches
If you have a tenant change utility supplier, then integrating new supplier invoices can be difficult for managing agents. Simaxx makes it easy to handle multiple utility suppliers as if they were all the same utility company.
A tenant can switch utility providers without written permission in certain situations. As the landlord or managing agent of the property, you are responsible for passing along utility bills from these utility companies.
Multi-Tenanted Premises
Simaxx provides a way for landlords to handle a multi-let property where each tenant may be getting different meter readings, suppliers and a range of other utility bills specific to their meter reading levels. Multi-tenanted buildings can have complex utility bills that require careful management to get right.
Fair Utility Bills
If bills are being decided based on each tenant’s energy consumption, managing agents need to compile data from meters, sub-meters and any prepaid meter readings they have. If a tenant has changed from the original meter, then the meter reading work may be even more complex.
Simaxx can help landlords and managing agents calculate the fair utility cost for each tenant based on accurate data.
Specific Solutions
If you need a system that allows you to reclaim energy costs or make exceptions for specific tenants, then Simaxx allows you to build your own custom structure for handling utility bills. This can be important for commercial landlords that work with commercial property, especially a multi-let space hosting a range of businesses.
Data Retention
Simaxx saves as much data as you allow it to, meaning that it can double as a source of property records: electricity usage, total billing amounts, or even just a record of how much power tenants have been using.
Additional Costs
You can roll additional costs and obligations into Simaxx as needed. For example, council tax can be included alongside energy costs, handled either together or individually within the same data platform.
Simplicity
By rolling all of their costs (utility bills, council tax, etc.) into a single platform, a landlord can keep track of every payment they are responsible for. This allows them to check if a certain bill has been paid at a glance rather than needing to sort through multiple independent systems and accounts.
Scalability
Simaxx is a versatile data analysis platform that can support any amount of information. This makes it a great option for landlords who want to expand to new properties or who want to open up a property to more tenants and need a billing system that can keep up.
What is Tenant Billing?
Tenant billing is the process through which tenants in a commercial or residential building are billed for rent and utilities. Tenant billing is usually handled through a tenant billing software system.
Consistent Presentation of Billing Data
The Heating Networks (Metering & Billing) Regulations – HNMBR, are an essential requirement for property managers with multiple letting within a commercial building. The regulations require that a communal heating system is correctly metered at the point of usage.
With appropriate metering in place, Simaxx can easily present the data in the form of a tenant billing report. The example shows a mixture of different energy utilities being consumed each with its own price rate. The reports can be generated for monthly consumption.
Building managers can make the Simaxx data available to the tenants to monitor their consumption during normal operations. Alerts can be created if consumption exceeds threshold values.