Utilities: Adding Bills

FMX offers several options for entering bill data to accommodate both historical records and ongoing invoices.

Single Bill Entry

Manually submit and review a single bill for immediate updates. When entering a single bill, you can opt to upload a pdf of the bill and have FMX’s AI-Powered data extraction provide suggested field entries. These suggestions can be approved in bulk by clicking approve all or individually by clicking the suggestion under the field.

Bulk Import (Excel)

Navigate to the Bulk Imports section and use FMX spreadsheet templates to migrate large volumes of historical utility data at once.

Bulk Upload

Upload files in batches to have the system scan and process them, with the ability to review the results afterwards.

First, select Bulk upload bills

Upload your pdf

Once you have uploaded your pdf, you should see a success banner on your screen indicating that the batch has begun processing. You will receive an email confirmation once the pdf has been processed. Once processed, you can review the created bills and make any necessary updates.

Understanding FMX AI-powered Data Extraction

FMX Utility Manager employs an AI-driven scanner to automatically extract data from your invoices, reducing manual entry errors.

• PDF Upload: Upload PDF utility bills directly to the platform. You will receive an email after each bulk upload with information on your upload status.
• Email Forwarding: Set up automated bill ingestion by forwarding billing emails to FMX. When forwarding emails, use the email provided in the admin settings. It will look like "bills@hostname.gofmx.com"
• Refining Accuracy: You can add Provider-specific instructions to the AI to improve the accuracy of its suggestions and field population. We also suggest starting off single bill uploads to test accuracy and fine-tune instructions before moving to bulk upload or email forwarding. 

Understanding Your Bill

Utilities uses bill workflow states to help you track what still needs attention. You may see concepts such as:

• Entered: A bill that was manually entered, or a bill that has already been reviewed and accepted.
• Pending review: A bill uploaded via email forwarding or bulk upload that has all required information, but is waiting for human approval.
• Missing data: A bill uploaded via email forwarding or bulk upload that is missing one or more required fields, including required custom fields.

By default FMX will track the following fields for Utilities bills, but you can always add additional custom fields

General bill info

• Utility Provider: Which provider the bill is for (selected on the bill).
• Utility Account: Which account number the bill is for (selected on the bill).
• Bill cycle: A single “bucket” date used to place the bill into the correct period based on the provider’s billing frequency (Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly). This field is not visible for providers on an Other interval.

Bill start date: Start of the service period for the bill.

• Bill end date: End of the service period for the bill.

Meter consumption & demand (only shown when you have meters configured)

• Meter consumption: Consumption values per meter (only when tracking consumption and splitting by meter).
• Meter demand: Demand values per meter (only when tracking demand and splitting by meter).

General bill charges

• Total bill amount: Total cost for the bill Consumption total: Total consumption for the bill (in the provider’s configured unit), if consumption tracking is enabled
• Consumption charge: Portion of cost attributed to consumption, if enabled
• Demand total: Total demand for the bill (in the provider’s configured unit), if demand tracking is enabled
• Demand charge: Portion of cost attributed to demand, if enabled
• Late fee charge: Late fee amount
• Tax charge: Tax amount
• Other charge: Catch-all “other” charges

As you enter values, FMX automatically calculates common derived fields such as:

• Billing days
• Average daily cost
• Average daily consumption
• Unit cost (for example, consumption charge divided by consumption total)