Data base techniques for analyzing electric power bills

Oil and gas production and pipeline companies generally process many electric power bills for considerable amounts of money. It is shown that even though each power company has a different method of figuring electricity costs, simple techniques can be devised to identify potential billing payment mistakes, along with areas for operations improvement. With the use of a computer and database software, these techniques reduce the amount of time spent performing this task compared to analyzing each bill one at a time. The author addresses how to implement this system and relates some experiences that proved that this approach could save significant amounts of money and time. In eight months of using a database to analyze electric power bills, $75000 in billing errors and data entry errors were found, and $25000 per year was saved by improving operational procedures. This was accomplished with minimal capital expenditure, time and effort. Power-factor correction required some capital investment but paid out in less than one year