Water Utilities and Billing Leads to Expanded Offerings for National Provider

by Patrick Revere

TTwenty years ago, a person in the field would check utility meters. Now, new technologies allow for auto-reporting on utility and meter activity on an hourly basis or better, identifying billing mistakes, system disruptions and any developing risk factors.

Zack Beck is the national sales manager for Conservice, a utilities and expense management provider, founded in 2000 in Logan, Utah by Dave Jenkins.

“I get caught up sometimes and have to remind myself that there are a lot of business areas and competing priorities,” Beck said. “I have always looked at utility management as one of the larges gaps for property managers and place it can really make or break a property budget.

“By leveraging automation to quality check sensitive utility invoices, it becomes an insurance policy to one of your largest expenses and in most cases the second largest contributor to income,” Beck said of Conservice’s role in business management. “Most property managers may take a bit of time to look at the bill just to see that it costs about the same amount month over month. That’s not really an ideal way to ensure the invoices they are receiving from their providers are accurate, and what you miss certainly can add up.”

Beck and others in the industry are seeing that the demand for utility billing and other automated, remote »

business management services are in higher and higher demand.

“We are seeing a thirst for services from the MH space,” Beck said. “Starting with the larger operators, it became clear that managing communities takes more than an adherence to the simple spreadsheet.”

A recent client acquired 20-plus communities in a recent transaction, and Conservice will take the burden of acquisition off the owner by setting up utilities accounts in the new ownership name for accounting and billing.

Conservice installs submeters for each home that are attached to the community’s main meter. Installing submeters makes for simpler and more accurate leak detection. The mere presence of a submeter tends to curb a resident’s water use by about 25%, Beck said.

Beyond influencing consumer behavior, submetering and associated technologies help to answer a lot of questions, and save a lot of money.

Is the system at capacity? Is there a failure anywhere? Are the utility rates being calculated properly? This is all on the resident and local providers, sometimes down to the county level, and the practices, processes, and rates are different everywhere.

The company employs an in-house development team, and last year processed about $15 billion in utilities, finding $18 million in exceptions for clients.

“All of the systems we provide clean up the process dramatically,” Beck said.

The “meter wars” have heated up in the industry, Beck said, but he feels getting too competitive defeats the purpose.

“That’s really not where the focal point should be,” he said. “For instance, we use all different kinds of meters, and it’s really just a matter of what the best option is for the customer.”

Conservice’s solutions plug into Rent Manager and the other major accounting software providers of choice and create pathways for the failure to pay utility bills so they can be forwarded and factored in with the rental agreements.

“The way we set up our customers, it allows us to fetch the bill directly from the utility provider, getting usage about five days prior to when our clients would normally obtain a paper bill,” Beck said.

They double check rates, see that they’re applied properly, finds mistakes, and will dispatch a resolution team to recover the lost amount, as needed, before it ever goes to a customer or resident. The offering even helps residents build credit by offering tools that allow the company to report when rent and utility payments are made on time.

“The innovation that has occurred and continues to improve still impresses me daily. We now fetch, quality check and pay roughly 85% of invoice electronically and the site staff hours that are saved allows management companies to reallocate those resources to other areas of the business,” Beck said. MHV

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