Bill auditing

A commercial electricity bill is a compound document: a supply charge from your retail provider, a set of regulated delivery charges from CenterPoint, and taxes. Each has its own logic, and errors in the second two are worth more than most supply savings.

Tariff classification

CenterPoint bills commercial customers under different rate classes depending on load size and characteristics. The class assigned when your meter was installed may no longer match how the business operates — after equipment changes, an expansion, a shift-pattern change or a change of tenant.

This is the most common recoverable finding, and it is not a mistake anyone made. It is a setting that has quietly become wrong, and it can persist for years because there is no mechanism that reviews it.

Demand charges

Demand is billed on the highest fifteen-minute interval in the period. Worth verifying:

• That the billed demand matches the interval data — occasionally it does not.
• Whether a ratchet clause applies, under which a single high peak sets a floor for subsequent months.
• Whether a one-off peak, from a test, a failure or an unusual event, is still driving your charges.
• Whether operational sequencing could reduce the peak that gets billed at all.

Power factor

Facilities with substantial motor load can drift below the utility's power factor threshold and incur a penalty. Correction is a capital decision — capacitor banks and the like — but knowing the penalty exists and what it costs annually is what makes that decision possible. Many operators have never had it pointed out.

Meter multipliers

Larger services are metered through instrument transformers, and the reading is multiplied by a constant. A wrong multiplier is rare and consequential, because it scales everything on the bill. It is a quick check and worth making.

Contract rate verification

A basic reconciliation: does the supply rate on the bill match the rate in the contract, month after month? Discrepancies appear most often after a contract rolls over, after a supplier system migration, or when a pass-through charge is applied that the contract did not contemplate.

Sales tax

Texas provides a predominant use exemption where more than half the electricity through a meter is consumed in manufacturing, processing or fabrication. Establishing it requires a study, and it applies to considerably more businesses than claim it — particularly smaller fabrication and food processing operations that do not think of themselves as manufacturers.

This is a tax matter, not an energy one. We flag where it looks likely and you take it to your accountant.

What an audit is not

It is not a route to a guaranteed refund, and anyone promising one before seeing a bill is guessing. Most audits find that the billing is broadly correct and the opportunity is in the supply contract or the tariff class. That is still worth knowing, and it costs you nothing to find out.