sgBill, provides suppliers with a comprehensive billing, payment, collections, and debt reporting tool, with a Deal Billing functionality that enables quantity and price elements of energy to be defined and obtained from multiple sources.

Deal Billing is an alternative to Tariff Billing and was initially designed for industrial and commercial (I&C) businesses and power generators that export energy into the grid through Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). However, it could also be used by a variety of customer types with other complex or price component level agreements. It is suited to businesses looking to provide their customers with transparent and flexible approaches to energy supply – particularly useful within the leisure, agricultural and electric vehicle (EV) industries where energy usage makes up a large part of a business’ costs.

Alex Troth, Commercial Director at Seaglass Cloud Technology, says what much of the energy sector currently manages manually via complex and inflexible spreadsheets can now be fully automated through sgBill’s Deal Billing solution: “The purpose is to provide greater functionality and flexibility in how energy providers can bill their portfolios,” he says. “It is also about being able to show their customers how much energy they are using and when, so they can use these insights to make better informed decisions.”

Deal Billing enables businesses to self-bill when generating energy sold into the grid and create bespoke billing systems for clients so that any ‘deal’ can be modelled and accommodated. It therefore helps businesses take on more customers more easily – providing the same efficiency for a business managing 100 meters as 10,000.

Alex says that the system’s key benefit is its configurability: “It has been built from the ground up to be as configurable, scalable and auditable as possible. It gives businesses the power to determine how they charge and what margins they make, using pricing, energy purchasing volumes and bespoke formulas to calculate a fair rate.

“Deal Billing automatically incorporates pricing changes (and the costs of transmission, distribution etc) so the business does not need to manually account for these,” he explains. “It is the most transparent way a tariff can work.

“With the increasing use of smart meters, more businesses understand their energy usage and are looking to make efficiencies. Future industry developments – most notably the mandatory half-hourly settlement – are already built in and we predict the increasing need for such functionality.”

sgBill is one of six modules in Seaglass’ end-to-end system which include: sgInteract to handle all electronics communications with industry participants; sgServe to manage customer interactions and industry processes; sgPrice for highly-configurable, auditable and meter-specific prices; sgRisk delivering the tools to forecast usage, revenue and profit for any meter; and sgSign, a module to simplify the quote-to-contract journey.