Case Study: City of Virginia Beach achieves EDI utility billing automation and 150-hour/month processing savings with EnergyCAP

Committee Conceived Plan Transforms Virginia Beach into an Energy Leader

The City of Virginia Beach faced rapidly rising utility costs (from about $15.5M for electricity to over $24M in total utility spend) and a decentralized, paper-based bill review process that caused duplicate charges, late payments, and limited visibility for auditing and conservation. To address this, the City convened a cross-departmental Joint Energy Committee and in August 2012 selected EnergyCAP’s energy management software to centralize billing, auditing, and reporting.

Using EnergyCAP as the core system and implementing EDI-based invoice transfer and payment workflows, the City imported historical billing data, automated nightly audits and GL mappings, and integrated with Accounts Payable. EnergyCAP helped transition 828 Dominion accounts to EDI (with more vendors planned), eliminated thousands of paper invoices, cut about 150 manual processing hours per month, shortened invoice processing by at least two days, and cost roughly 0.7% of annual energy expense—delivering improved billing accuracy, avoided late fees, and better energy reporting to guide conservation.

City of Virginia Beach

Lori J. Herrick

Energy Management Administrator