Energy cost reporting for finance and AP teams

Insights reports in pounds as well as kilowatt hours, at meter, building, site and portfolio level, so a variance can be traced from the annual budget line down to a single half-hour. Half-hourly electricity, gas and water refresh roughly every 30 minutes after settlement, and AMR meters refresh daily. Consumption is weather-adjusted using heating and cooling degree days, so a month-on-month or year-on-year movement can be attributed to trading activity rather than to a cold February.

Access is role-based with an audit trail and unlimited users, so an accounts payable clerk, a site manager and the finance director each see the level they need. Every view exports to CSV, Excel, PDF or a board-pack PDF, and a read-only JSON API is available on request for finance, BI and ESG systems. Historical data goes back up to six years where supplier data flows allow, which is usually enough to evidence a budget assumption rather than argue about it.

Bill validation runs every billing cycle, line-by-line against the contracted rate. Where a charge does not match, the flag reaches Purely first. Our account team raises the credit note with the supplier and chases it to ledger, so the recovery work does not land on accounts payable. The credit, the date it landed and the reason all appear in the monthly reconciliation pack, which gives finance an audit trail rather than a verbal assurance that something was sorted out.

One published example: a hotel group with 11 properties had a bill validation alert in month 2. The supplier issued a £6,400 credit and corrected the going-forward rate, so the error stopped repeating as well as being refunded. That second part matters more to a budget than the credit itself, because an uncorrected rate error compounds quietly across every remaining month of the contract.

Billing stays simple: one supplier invoice per fuel per meter, plus one Purely-side reconciliation pack covering every site, every variance, every credit and the running annual position. The pack is free. There is never a separate Insights invoice, no per-meter fee, no kit-rental fee, no minimum portfolio size and no hidden uplift on the unit rate. Where sub-metering sensors are installed, Purely supplies, installs and owns them, so they sit on our balance sheet rather than arriving as capex or a lease.

The platform is funded by a disclosed broker margin on supply, 0.3p to 1.0p per kWh depending on volume and term, shown line-by-line on every quote and every renewal. Finance can therefore see what the monitoring costs inside the unit rate rather than inferring it. From contract signature to a live dashboard takes 7 to 14 working days, and the work on the customer side is a portfolio list or recent bills, signed data-access letters of authority, and a list of alert recipients.

Renewal-window alerts fire at 12, 9 and 6 months out, which is the difference between a planned renewal and a rushed one. The recommendation that follows breaks the price into wholesale, non-commodity, supplier margin and Purely margin, shown separately, so the negotiation happens on the part of the bill that is actually movable. Peak-demand and DUoS red-band exposure is flagged before the charge reaches the bill, which removes one of the more common sources of unbudgeted in-year variance.

Procurement is usually where the largest movement sits. Good Taste Bakery, a multi-site retail and food business, cut annual energy spend from £150,000 to £82,375, a £67,625 saving every year. Once a contract like that is signed, monitoring holds the position: invoices validated against the new rate, variances raised while they are small, benchmarking that shows which site is the outlier, and a running annual figure finance can take to a board without rebuilding it in a spreadsheet.