SANTA BARBARA, CA - Yardi Systems, a leading developer of real estate investment and property management software, has announced its acquisition of Energy Billing Systems, Inc. (EBS), which provides utility management services to the multifamily housing industry. The deal will enable Yardi to provide billing and metering services as part of Yardi Utility Billing™, the company's newly developed, fully integrated utility billing solution for its multifamily clients using Yardi Voyager™.
The acquisition of EBS means that Yardi Utility Billing will be able to offer both submeter calculations and ratio utility billing system (RUBS) calculations. Located in Colorado Springs, Colo. (with a magnificent view of 14,110-foot Pikes Peak), EBS has a 28-year history of specializing in submeter servicing and meter reading, utility consumption analysis, and the allocation of resident utility usage costs for individual dwellings in master-metered multifamily complexes. The resulting allocations are then entered into Yardi Utility Billing and used to calculate individual resident utility charges, which are added to each resident's monthly rent bill. EBS has acquired an impressive list of clients across the U.S., including the U.S. Naval Station Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
"We acquired EBS to help satisfy demands in the multifamily real estate market for centralized submetering and RUBS capabilities. EBS has built an excellent reputation over its 28 years in business, and this strategic acquisition capitalizes on the expertise of a well-established and well-respected company," said Terri Dowen, Yardi's senior vice president of Sales. "We anticipate continuing to serve and expand the existing EBS client base, and we look forward to offering our fully integrated Utility Billing product to them and to Yardi's other multifamily clients."
As part of the Yardi Voyager Property Management platform, Yardi Utility Billing leverages the central database to utilize existing resident, unit, occupancy and square footage information to automate the utility billing process. Utility invoices can be scanned and entered using Yardi PAYscan™, after which time the utility cost allocations are used to auto-calculate resident utility charges. The charges are then converged onto a single bill along with the resident's rent and other charges. The resident can then pay the convergent bill online using Yardi Portal™, or by check, which can be processed using Yardi CHECKscan™.
Yardi Utility Billing offers some unique benefits because of its Voyager integration. Convergent bills, key to ensuring timely utility payment, are auto-generated by Voyager. All of the measurements, allocations, calculations and processing are performed directly in the Voyager database, so no data transfer is required. The utility billing process feeds directly into all of the other processes, including invoice processing, payment processing and analytics.
"Our goal is to enable our multifamily clients to take advantage of their Yardi platform to gain some utility processing benefits that are only possible using a centralized platform," said Dowen. "EBS will be a key part of this process."
Source: Yardi Systems