Picked up a nursing home chain with 23 facilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey — mix of PPL, PECO, and PSE&G accounts. Found the same error on 19 of 23 facilities: they were all on a standard commercial rate when they should have been on a healthcare/institutional rate that both PPL and PSE&G offer. The rate difference is about 8% lower per kWh. Across 19 facilities that's $14,000/month in savings. Same mistake replicated 19 times because whoever set up the accounts originally just picked the default commercial rate.
Nursing home chain — consistent errors across 23 facilities
That's the beauty of chain audits — find one error and multiply it across every location. I had the exact same experience with a assisted living group in Virginia on Dominion Energy. Seven locations, all on the wrong rate. It took me about 4 hours to confirm the error across all seven once I identified it on the first one. My contingency fee on that was $52,000 for what amounted to two days of actual work. The per-location audit time drops dramatically after the first one.
This is a perfect example of why portfolio audits are so valuable. The systematic error — the same mistake replicated across multiple locations — is the most profitable finding in utility bill auditing. And healthcare facilities are particularly prone to it because the facilities are similar in size and usage pattern, so the utility defaults them to the same incorrect rate. For anyone reading this, when you audit any chain client, always check the first finding across every other location before moving on to other error types. The multiplier effect is where the real money is.