A practical warning for anyone taking on a hospital, university, or research campus.
The account list you are given will not match the meter reality, and the addresses are the reason. Large institutional sites frequently have a single mailing or billing address used across every account, while the actual services sit at half a dozen different street addresses on the same campus. Buildings get renumbered. A facility fronting one street is metered from another.
I recently reviewed an authorization listing four accounts where the gas service was at one street number and the electric at a different number on the same street. Those may be two genuinely separate premises or one of the numbers may be wrong on the paperwork, and there is no way to tell from the documents alone. That question needs answering before any records request goes out, because a wrong service address is the fastest way to have a request bounced.
Two habits that help.
Reconcile the account list against the utility's own service address for each account, not against the client's list. They differ more often than not.
Get a facilities contact, not just a finance contact. Finance knows which accounts they pay. Only facilities knows which building each meter is actually in, and on a campus that distinction is the whole audit.
The account list you are given will not match the meter reality, and the addresses are the reason. Large institutional sites frequently have a single mailing or billing address used across every account, while the actual services sit at half a dozen different street addresses on the same campus. Buildings get renumbered. A facility fronting one street is metered from another.
I recently reviewed an authorization listing four accounts where the gas service was at one street number and the electric at a different number on the same street. Those may be two genuinely separate premises or one of the numbers may be wrong on the paperwork, and there is no way to tell from the documents alone. That question needs answering before any records request goes out, because a wrong service address is the fastest way to have a request bounced.
Two habits that help.
Reconcile the account list against the utility's own service address for each account, not against the client's list. They differ more often than not.
Get a facilities contact, not just a finance contact. Finance knows which accounts they pay. Only facilities knows which building each meter is actually in, and on a campus that distinction is the whole audit.