A major public university meters and bills its own campus for the water and power it uses—chilled water, steam, natural gas, and electricity across the buildings it runs. Concourse built a single platform to handle that entire cycle, from meter reading to finished bill, in four months.
The problem
Every month, the university has to account for every drop of water and watt of power used across its campus—roughly $4,000,000 per month in utility costs. That requires collecting data from more than 800 meters, many of which are read by hand by a team of employees walking the campus. Once that data is collected, it has to be analyzed and converted into utility bills the university issues each month.
The university had managed this on another platform for years, but it wanted a system with more flexibility and ease.
The solution
Concourse built a centralized hub to track and bill all of the university’s utilities. The platform runs on two engines—one for consumption, one for billing. The first ingests odometer readings from each meter and calculates how much of the utility each cost center consumed that month. The second converts that into an editable billing table that exports directly to Workday, where the bills are paid.
The platform has a companion mobile app for the employees traversing campus to read the physical meters. Each reader is assigned a route within the app, and at every site they enter the meter’s reading. If a reading comes in lower than the month before—usually a sign of a mistake—the app flags it on the spot.
The platform also automates workflows that were once manual. When the university receives an invoice from a third-party utility provider, someone has to determine which cost center it should be billed to. Previously, an employee read the account numbers off the invoice, matched them to the right university account, wrote the relevant details on the invoice in red ink, and passed it to the accounting team to enter into Workday. The new platform uses AI to parse the invoice and identify the right account, then lets the employee email it directly to accounting.
Results
The platform manages the university’s entire utility operation. It’s built to shorten a cycle that used to stretch between 17 and 20 days each month, moving the university from meter readings to finished bills faster than its previous process allowed. And it’s set to save employees hours each month by automating tasks they once did by hand, like sorting third-party invoices.