Energy invoice verification

The more sites a company runs, the less realistic it becomes to check every energy invoice. Documents arrive from many suppliers and network operators — in different formats, through different channels, with different deadlines — and any one of them may carry an inflated rate, a charge that contradicts the contract, or a penalty with no basis. An invoice nobody checked is a paid error and a claim never filed.

The Energy Invoice Settlement System is a module of the Percee® platform (EMOS) that takes over this control end to end: it collects the documents, reads them, reduces them to a single structured record and verifies them along three independent dimensions — formal, contractual and metered. It is not software the client operates alone: the service is run day to day by Solwena's Energy Management Centre team. All that reaches the client for review is whatever the system flags as an anomaly.

Why energy invoices slip out of control

The problem is not that a single invoice cannot be checked. It is the number and the variety: dozens or hundreds of metering points, electricity, gas and heat, the supplier billed separately from the distributor, plus re-invoices from facility managers. Line-by-line manual checking of the whole stream stops being feasible — and spot checking, by definition, lets through whatever it did not look at.

The most common errors that pass unchallenged in a stream like this:

• A rate that contradicts the contract — an energy price or trading fee different from the one in the active contract, often after an amendment or a change of term.
• Charges with no basis — distribution or subscription components the contract does not provide for.
• Reactive power and contracted capacity penalties — high-value line items, issued automatically and rarely questioned. The lasting fix is to bring the capacity charge down, but first you have to know the penalty appeared at all.
• Double billing and gaps between periods — the same period settled twice, or a month never invoiced that comes back later as a correction.
• Divergence from actual consumption — an invoiced volume that does not match the readings, including estimated settlements nobody ever compared against the meter.

An invoice nobody checked is a paid error and a claim never filed.

KSeF changes the workflow, not just the format

The arrival of KSeF, Poland's national e-invoicing system, splits the document into parts that reach you at different times and by different routes. The invoice comes through KSeF; its attachment with the settlement detail arrives separately, usually by e-mail. A re-invoice may have no attachment at all, and a single attachment can cover several invoices. Suppliers will not reshape their processes around the recipient, so it is the system on the recipient's side that has to cope with an asynchronous workflow: accept the parts in any order, match them, and only then close the settlement.

Three pillars of verification

The system reduces every invoice to one structured record — a settlement — covering the period, the site, the terms (energy volume, parameters, price) and the status. Every settlement is checked along three independent dimensions.

The order matters. Pillars 1 and 2 require no metering data and no installation on site — entering the contract and tariff terms into the system is enough to catch incomplete documents and invoices billed against the contract. That covers the large majority of settlement errors. Pillar 3 is added wherever a site is metered and connected to Percee®, and compares the invoice against continuous readings from the whole billing period rather than the meter state at the end of it.

For an organisation starting from zero this has a concrete consequence: the service can cover pillars 1 and 2 across the entire portfolio immediately, while pillar 3 phases in site by site as access to consumption data appears — from energy consumption monitoring or from readings. The entry threshold is low and the value grows in stages, with no upfront investment.

How documents reach the system

A document enters the system in one of two ways: by e-mail to a dedicated inbox, from which the system collects it on its own, or through the web interface. Optionally the system integrates with the external document-workflow software the client already uses. Collecting documents directly from suppliers' customer portals is planned for future versions.

From there the system works on its own. Integrated artificial intelligence reads the content of the document — understanding its structure regardless of the individual supplier's format — then categorises it, matches invoices with their attachments and builds structured settlements from them. Invoices, re-invoices and corrections are supported for every energy carrier. A settlement holds the status “draft” for as long as any document is missing, and closes once the full set arrives and passes verification.

Irregularities land on one simple anomaly screen — and that is the only place anyone has to watch day to day. Everything, archive included, is reachable from a single browser interface, with search and a preview of the source documents.

One portfolio, many legal entities

The system does not assume every site belongs to one company. Each site has an assigned company as the recipient of its settlements — a necessary condition for franchise networks, groups of companies and property portfolio managers, where one system has to serve anything from a handful to thousands of independent entities while keeping costs and documents correctly assigned to the right company.

Permissions mirror the structure of the organisation: head office sees the whole portfolio and supervises the process, an intermediate level (a region, say) sees its own slice, and the user of a single site or company sees only their own data, with no view of anyone else's. The same system therefore gives head office comparability between locations, which surfaces anomalies on its own, while respecting the separation of each entity's data.

What the system maintains on the data side

Verification is only as good as the reference data it rests on. On the configuration side the system maintains:

• The portfolio of sites together with their assigned owners (the companies being billed).
• Suppliers — sellers and distributors held separately.
• Contracts and tariffs understood as rules for calculating cost, not merely as PDF files.
• Metering points — physical (PPE) and virtual (WPPE), for sites billed without a direct connection to the network operator.

On that basis a settlement is formed: one record covering the period, the site, the terms and the status. Verified data feeds cost analytics in Percee® as well as the reporting the client already runs — we match the export format to the tools used on their side. Reports are available in the system and can be sent to designated users on a schedule. The same data layer is the starting point for CSRD and Scope 2 reporting, where what counts is not only cost but the volume of energy and where it came from.

What the organisation gets out of it

• Control over costs where there is none today. Every invoice is checked, and checked in full rather than in samples. A single caught rate error or unfounded penalty usually far exceeds the cost of verifying that point.
• Less manual work. Reading, categorising and matching invoices with attachments happen automatically. People deal only with what the system flags as an anomaly.
• The document workflow stops being a problem. The multi-channel, asynchronous inflow is handled by the system, no matter how and when suppliers send it.
• One picture of the whole portfolio. Head office gets comparability between locations and a view of the whole, while each entity sees only its own data. Verified settlements feed the reporting already in place.
• A foundation for further optimisation. Settlement data lands in the same platform used for energy consumption optimization. Settlements are the first step, not a separate tool.

Who this makes sense for

The service works for a single site, but it delivers the most value where the invoices are many. As a rough threshold: from a dozen or so invoices a month, thorough manual checking of every line stops being feasible, and the variety of issuers, tariffs and channels grows faster than the team's time.

A service, not another licence

Solwena has been developing the Percee® platform since 2016 and provides energy management services on top of it. Office buildings, retail chains, logistics operators and industrial plants use the solution.

Settlement verification is run day to day by the Energy Management Centre team — the people who supervise settlements, examine anomalies and maintain the reference data. What the client receives is therefore not another licence to operate alone, but a working service that keeps going regardless of how much attention they give it.

Data is hosted in the European Union and protected in line with GDPR: encrypted transmission, separation of permissions, a full audit trail.

How we start

We roll out in stages, with no capital outlay at the start. We usually begin with a pilot on a selected set of sites covering pillars 1 and 2 — formal verification and contract compliance — and extend the service to the whole portfolio once the value is confirmed.

The division of work at the start is simple:

Want to see how many errors are in your invoices? Send us the documents from a single billing period for a selection of sites. We will verify them under pillars 1 and 2 and show you what the system caught — on your contracts and your tariffs.

Request a free invoice check · See what the Percee® platform is