Retail energy back-office automation
Reconciliation, reporting and pass-through integrity for Texas REPs, built on five years inside retail energy back offices, not by generalists learning your market on your budget.
Paid once, recovered once
Delivery charges pass through you. The TDU invoices you, you remit, you bill the customer, and every dollar should be paid once and recovered once. When those three streams drift apart the money leaves quietly, small enough per account that nothing trips and large enough across the book to show up as a margin slightly thinner than plan.
We find it, name the mechanism, and put a number on it.
Texas TDU delivery rates step on March 1 and September 1. A pass-through table that lags the step does not fail loudly; it under-recovers on every affected account until someone reconciles back to the tariff.
We have worked this problem from the inside
Our technical lead spent five years as a consultant at Capco, delivering back-office reporting, billing reconciliation, contracted-versus-billed rate checks and pass-through work for major retail energy firms. That work centred on the same three streams this page is about: utility invoices in, remittances out, and customer bills produced.
The retail electric side of it ran across nearly every deregulated market in the country, ERCOT included, on books that did not agree with each other about who owns a receivable or who produces the customer's bill. Reconciliation that holds up across that many markets has to encode where they diverge instead of learning one market's habits and assuming they travel. In ERCOT the retailer keeps the receivable and the credit risk that comes with it. Nobody bought that debt off you, so what your ageing report says is what you are actually carrying.
It means we arrive already speaking your vocabulary. We do not need the 810 and 820 set explained, we know why an unbilled report is mostly false positives before we open yours, and we know that a rate table and a tariff are two different things that are supposed to agree.
Client engagements from that work belong to the firms that commissioned them, so you will not find them named here. We are happy to talk through the specifics on a call.
810 invoices matched to 820 remittances to catch utility invoices paid twice and utility invoices never paid.
Closing the loop the other way: every customer behind a remittance, confirmed invoiced. Cancelled and reissued bills traced back to the original, so the exceptions that surface are real.
AR ageing bucketed out past 360 days, collections with POR and Non-POR receivables separated, and general-ledger reconciliation views over SQL Server and Oracle.
Active-account files from dozens of utilities, each in its own format and on its own schedule, normalised into one view worth reconciling against.
Four things, done properly
Scoped to retail electric operations. Everything runs against extracts from your systems. No platform migration, no access to production required.
TDU pass-through reconciliation
TDU pass-through reconciliation matches the 810 you were invoiced against the 820 you remitted against what actually reached the customer's bill. Keyed on ESI ID and service month. Reports your recovery rate, your net position, and how much you paid the TDU and never billed out.
Rate-step diagnosis
Rate-step diagnosis finds pass-through tables that never picked up a TDU rate change. Texas TDU rates step March 1 and September 1. We reconstruct the tariff from your own extracts and test every account against it, so instead of "you under-recovered $X" you get "this TDU table never stepped, and these are the accounts still on the January rate."
Unbilled revenue monitoring
Unbilled revenue monitoring flags the accounts where usage arrived and no bill went out. Runs on a schedule and sends an exception report, so it is caught in days rather than at quarter close. Cancelled and reissued bills are traced back to their originals, because an unbilled report nobody trusts is worse than no report.
Manual reporting automation
Manual reporting automation turns the report someone rebuilds by hand every week into a pipeline that runs itself, with alerting when a source system changes shape.
A findings report, not a proposal
The deliverable names the mechanism and quantifies it per account and per service month, so your team can act on it without re-deriving the work. Here is the actual format, built on synthetic data.
View a sample findings reportSample uses synthetic data throughout. No client data appears in it.
- Recovery rate and net position across the book
- Variance by ESI ID and service month
- The named mechanism behind each variance
- An exception workbook your team can work from
Questions worth asking first
What is TDU pass-through reconciliation?
It is the check that every delivery charge you paid a TDU was also billed to a customer, and that nothing was paid twice. Delivery is a pass-through, so in principle your recovery should be a wash. Reconciliation is how you find out whether it actually is.
Why would a retail electric provider under-recover on TDU delivery charges?
Usually because a pass-through table did not step. Texas TDU delivery rates change on March 1 and September 1, and a table that lags the change quietly under-recovers on every affected account. Nothing errors out. You find it by testing your billed rates against the tariff, account by account.
What do you need from us to look at our pass-through?
Three exports: TDSP invoice detail, your remittance register, and your billing register. They are extracts from systems you already run, so nobody needs credentials to your production environment and nothing has to be connected. If your exports are messy, that is normal and we work with them as they are.
Do we have to replace a system or start a migration for this?
No. This runs against extracts, so your billing platform, your CIS and your workflows stay where they are. If a finding does turn out to need a real fix inside a system, we will say so plainly and scope that as its own decision rather than fold it into this one.
Why is our unbilled report full of false positives?
Most often because it does not trace bill lineage. When a bill is cancelled and reissued, both copies get pulled and one gets flagged as never billed. When a utility sends the same bill twice, every duplicate but one gets flagged. Trace cancels and duplicates back to the original and the noise in your report goes away.
Does RoboWave have real retail energy experience?
Yes. Our technical lead spent five years as a consultant at Capco on retail energy back-office reporting and reconciliation for major retail energy firms. The retail electric side of that ran across nearly every deregulated market in the country, ERCOT included, so the logic had to be correct about each market rather than habituated to one.
Three exports, four working days
Send three exports (TDSP invoice detail, your remittance register, your billing register) and we will tell you in four working days what your pass-through is actually costing you.
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