Utility bill auditing and processing just got a whole lot easier.

On November 9, 2016, I published a blog article titled, “Improving Utility Bill Auditing.” The article addressed a comment that we hear time and time again during initial conversations with prospective customers: “We know we should check our utility bills more closely, but we don’t have a system in place to do that.” I then outlined how our EnergyCAP software-based solution helps organizations overcome the challenges of utility bill processing and bill validation before they are paid.

Trade show season is approaching rapidly, and EnergyCAP will be an active participant. We have three major industry shows on our schedule, and we encourage you to visit with us at one or more of the venues:

Effective communication is a critical component of every energy management program. In a recent EnergyCAP-hosted webinar, James Bush, Program Manager of Energy Initiatives for Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG), described how EnergyCAP enables his staff to speak three languages: Facilities, Accounting, and Budgeting. 

State of Connecticut Executive Order

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont recently signed Executive Order No. 1 that, per the State’s website, “directs executive branch state office buildings and vehicle fleets to become greener and more energy efficient through an expanded ‘Lead By Example’ sustainability initiative aimed at reducing the state’s carbon footprint and reducing the cost of government operations.”

EnergyCAP’s inaugural Regional Training Conference (RTC) wrapped up yesterday in Irvine, CA. Feedback from those in attendance—EnergyCAP users from across the U.S.—was extremely positive, and EnergyCAP Version 7 received rave reviews.

Chargebacks (aka, Allocations, Re-billings, Distributions): The process by which energy provided to one organization is then allocated across multiple other departments or facilities. In practice, the organization’s Accounting or Facilities Department acts as the internal energy “vendor” for the rest of the campus, which may be a college or university, or it could be a hospital, prison, resort, industrial complex, or any shared facility configuration.

“Be a hero!”

That was the message from Steve Heinz, EnergyCAP, Inc. Founder & CEO, as he delivered the closing keynote address at the 2018 EnergyCAP Catalyst training conference. This year’s conference theme was “Change is Coming,” and Steve’s presentation armed the 200 conference attendees with five specific operational and organizational changes they could implement to deliver immediate and long-term energy and cost savings:

“The next generation of EnergyCAP—EnergyCAP Version 7—is now available.”

The energy industry’s trade show season is about to kick off, and EnergyCAP is an eager participant. We will be exhibiting at two major industry trade shows in August and September, and we encourage you to visit with us:

“Productivity Unleashed” was the theme of last month’s Catalyst Training for Savings Conference, and EnergyCAP, Inc. CEO Steve Heinz closed the conference with a keynote titled “10 Tips to Unleash Your Productivity.”  We shared tips 6–10 in our April 19^th blog, and now the suspense is over. The top five tips are presented below.

“A new year, a new me.”

It’s a phrase I’ve heard numerous times over the past three weeks, and I witness vigorous attempts to live up to the cliché every January when I walk into my local fitness facility. Of course, by February, the traffic has gotten back to “normal.”

Webster’s dictionary defines stewardship as, “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.”

As an adoptive parent, I can understand stewardship. Bringing a child who once belonged to different parents into your home is an act of stewardship. In fact, before the adoption is finalized and before you become the legal parent of the child, you’re called the child’s “steward.” You’ve been entrusted to care for a person which is not yet your own.

Our readers may remember a June blog where we shared a story about two of our EnergyCAP software developers who competed in a local golf charity event and ended up winning an all-expense-paid trip to Pebble Beach, California, to compete in the largest amateur golf tournament in the world.

Today, we’ll tell you the end of that story. We’ll also share about next Tuesday's webinar—the latest in our Energy Leader Webinar series. You won't want to miss it!

Today's blog is company news with a surprising twist. Our regular readers may recall a recent blog on automated testing by EnergyCAP's Jared Matthews. Jared had an interesting experience on the golf course with co-worker Terry Yoder last week, and we'd like to tell you about it.

On Tuesday, June 7, EnergyCAP, Inc. chipped in half the registration fee to send a group of eight golfers to the local Audi quattro Cup tournament, held at the Toftrees Golf Resort & Conference Center in State College, Pennsylvania.

Jared and Terry thought they were just golfing to help out with a local charity event. Read on to discover what they received as a result of their participation!

Today’s blog reveals feedback from our post-Catalyst conference survey.

Every year after our annual Catalyst Training for Savings conference, we provide an opportunity for attendees to share perspectives on their Catalyst experience. Congratulations to EnergyCAP client Lou Castelli for winning the survey Amazon Gift Card drawing!

Today is day three at Catalyst, EnergyCAP’s annual Training for Savings conference, and we thought we’d blog some of the pictorial highlights to give you an idea of the experience that we are providing this week in State College, Pennsylvania.

Jared Matthews is Software Quality Assurance Engineer at EnergyCAP.

As EnergyCAP, Inc. has taken its software products online, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have assumed increasing importance in our product development and quality assurance testing. This blog is about EnergyCAP’s API development, and exciting changes in our quality assurance processes that are making our online software versions more robust and useful for our growing client base.

If he was still alive, Steve Jobs would probably have grinned at last year’s news that YouTube moved from Flash to HTML5 as its primary technology for delivering videos.

Click here for a great article about YouTube’s four-year transition. And here’s the 2010 Steve Jobs letter that some say sealed the fate of Flash as a primary web development platform.

But what does this have to do with energy management?

Does utility bill data entry burden you?

It’s been more than a year now since we began promoting our Bill CAPture service here at EnergyCAP to provide efficient and relatively inexpensive ways for our customers to process their utility billing data.

The support and interest we received up front from many long-time users of our energy management software gave us assurance that we were on the right track, and a long-term state government contract will be helping us to build out this robust program even more.

It’s usually nice to get those letters that start off with “I’m pleased to inform you …” It’s sort of the opposite of the “Dear John” letter.

Sure, sometimes someone is just trying to sell you something, but often the news is genuinely good, and that was the case last month when we received our notification from Energy Manager Today that EnergyCAP, Inc. had won a Product of the Year award for our EnergyCAP energy management software. This wasn't the first national award we claimed this year, but the third. So in some ways, it was icing on the cake—a great way to cap a calendar year of progress and innovation.

This most recent award has delighted me for three reasons:

Small but mighty, the EnergyCAP finance department wields the power of the purse with precision and purpose. Today’s blog introduces our two-member Finance team. 

In any field, including energy management, there can be real power and opportunity in new beginnings.

I took a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, last Saturday to hold my first grandson for the very first time.

We saw him in the hospital on day two of his adventure outside the womb, and I have to say that the experience was very special and delightful for me. I’m not sure what he thought of the experience, because he wasn’t talking any language I could understand. In fact, he wasn’t communicating much at all, but that didn’t change my very positive attitude. And my daughter and son-in-law were obviously in a similar frame of mind.

The EnergyCAP team is up by four this summer, thanks to the addition of two new full-time staff members and two temporary summer employees.

We’d like to introduce them, and share their expertise and responsibilities in today’s blog.

Make new friends, but keep the old,
One is silver, and the other, gold.

The Girl Scout campfire song is old, but the sentiment is current, especially in business: It’s wonderful to find a new customer, but even better to keep your existing customers so happy that they keep coming back for more.

At EnergyCAP, our Customer Service team has the challenge of doing exactly that. In today’s blog, we unmask the EnergyCAP Customer Service department.

About 120 EnergyCAP users from North America recently gathered for the Catalyst Training Conference for hands-on training, networking with other users, one-on-one meetings with staff, new feature demos, and fun social events.

In case you missed it, here are some highlights, including the Catalyst Spoof video:

They're the geekiest of the geeks. Superheroes of cyberspace, they're known for a techno-speak vocabulary that is just short of incantation. They mysteriously appear and disappear from secure server rooms like Clark Kent from a telephone booth, keeping odd hours to perform their computer network miracles at times when the demand for bandwidth is lowest. They're the Operations team (Ops) at EnergyCAP. Today’s blog unmasks their valuable activity on behalf of our staff and our clients.

May I share some good news with you? EnergyCAP is officially an Environmental Leader!

We were notified by Environmental Leader (EL) magazine that EnergyCAP software was selected as an Environmental Leader Product of the Year.

The EL Product & Project Awards recognize excellence in environmental and sustainability management. According to EL Program Director Jennifer Hermes, the third year of this annual awards program drew more entries than ever, and competition was steep.

So how did we win?

An email marketing company called Aweber studied millions of email subject lines and discovered the most successful subject line ever. This email subject line delivered stellar results—an average email open rate of 90%!

That means 9 out of 10 people who received an email with that subject line opened it. Those of us in the email marketing industry know an open rate of 90% is almost unheard of, since average email open rates are more like 23%.

So what is the most successful email subject line ever?

Here's good news for 2015—EnergyCAP is hiring! We’re looking to fill two important positions on our Implementation Solutions team. This department works with clients to implement EnergyCAP at their organization. EnergyCAP users are great candidates because they’re familiar with the software and have gone through the implementation process already.

While we’re not looking to steal talent from anyone, we realize that sometimes a better fit with a different organization benefits all the parties involved. We also realize that our blog network is part of a much larger network, so please forward this information to friends or colleagues who might be interested! Here are the two job openings: