Imagine this: 

You’re a Property Investor, Cash Buyer, iBuyer, Home Flipper, or a Property Development Company. In general, a company that has a portfolio of properties and that is constantly buying and selling. Furthermore, you manage utilities for your portfolio in-house. 

It’s all going well, the business is growing and this happens:

The company’s accounts payable department discovered that utility bills were being paid for a house whose status is SOLD.

So, what happened?

Let’s see this first scenario: you have some of the utilities of your portfolio on autopay, which means that it is till you check the accounts that you realize that the numbers don’t match. What could be happening?

You realize that your company has been paying for a property that you recognize but something seems odd because you thought it had already been sold.

Between the things that could have happened, you might think “whose fault is this?”

Here’s the thing, humans are certainly not perfect and in the beginning, utility bill management probably seems annoying but not hard, and with a controllable amount of spreadsheets, it’s no big deal, right? 

When the company starts to scale is when issues start to arise, because as the property volume increases, you need to track more details about the bills and properties, more spreadsheets are created and more connections and disconnections are requested in a not so friendly and tedious process that involves dealing for long hours with utility providers. Furthermore, some billing is received via paper bills and others via e-bills or paperless bills, which makes it harder to have full control of the due dates, amounts to pay, and bills to pay.

To make it easier for your team, let’s say you set up some of the bills on autopay. However, even if you hadn’t done that, it was always a possibility that a mistake like paying bills for a sold property, would happen. It happened to some of our clients. Believe us, it’s more common than you think.

if you’re a glass-half-full type of person, you’ll see that this is almost a good problem to have because it means you’re scaling. Congratulations if this is your case! The other good news is that you’re not alone, and there are solutions that can help with this kind of problem.

How to avoid paying for a sold property:

1. Centralize your billing data. Instead of using multiple spreadsheets, organize all data in one spot. If you want to streamline the utility bill process, consider a utility bill management software.
2. Monitor periodically the accounts on autopay. Or have a third party do it for you.
3. Improve communication between teams. See if the communication channels are working. Centralizing data is a way to solve this issue too.
4. Get advice from an expert in utility bill management to determine the best strategy for your company.
5. Outsource utility bill management. Trust the experts and harness the power of technology, while being able to access reports on consumption and costs.

These solutions are proven to save time and money for real estate companies. If you’re ever looking to reduce the burden of manual utility bill tracking, our platform can help achieve 95% SLA.

Utility Junction is a solution that can help any business in the field of real estate to simplify utility & bill management processes. This platform can reduce the amount of time & money spent on administrative tasks and provide an infrastructure for analyzing financial data for both individual property and multi-property organizations.

Get a quick overview of all your portfolio’s utility accounts, keep track of payments and expenses, transfer services painlessly and remotely, get bill due date reminders, and more. Utility Junction’s platform is the only solution you’ll ever need to manage your utility needs end to end.  So, let’s connect for a discovery call & we can discuss the challenges you are facing in your operations. Know exactly what you need, contact us here or send us an email at support@utilityjunction.com