Taking on a Subway franchise audit - 180 locations across 8 states with utilities ranging from Duke Energy to PSE&G to Xcel. Every utility has different billing formats and customer service policies. How do you guys manage the data collection phase when you're dealing with this many different utility companies?
Fast food franchise nightmare - 180 locations, 12 different utilities
Michelle, we did a similar Pizza Hut portfolio. The trick is batching your utility requests by company and developing templates for each one. PSE&G wants forms filled out differently than Xcel, but once you have the templates it's mostly copy/paste. Took us about 6 weeks to get all the historical bills.
Also don't underestimate the franchise vs corporate-owned complexity. Half our Subway locations had LOAs on file with corporate, the other half we had to chase down individual franchisees. Some hadn't looked at their electric bills in years and didn't even know they could authorize an audit.