A $20,000 Win: How Westminster Canterbury Used Energy Manager to Recoup Thousands of Overpaid Utility Bills

Recouping Overpaid Utility Costs

Before implementing Energy Manager in 2022, Westminster Canterbury Richmond used an Excel spreadsheet to track utility costs. Since the team began using Energy Manager, it’s become much easier to keep track of utility usage and costs. In the first two years of using the software, Westminster Canterbury Richmond discovered between $20,000 and $25,000 in overpaid utility bills due to billing mistakes. One utility company cut a check to the organization, while another provided a large credit to its account, says Jason Wells, Manager of Facility Services. 

Energy Manager has also allowed facility leaders to communicate easily about energy usage to stakeholders.  “It’s easy to pull data from the system and create graphics and visuals to help us communicate with our executive team and our resident-driven sustainability committee,” Wells says. “The software makes it so much easier to tell the story of how we’re saving energy.” 

Improving Efficiency 

At Westminster Canterbury Richmond, TheWorxHub is available on the online portal for resident use, the intranet for all staff, and available via iPad for maintenance staff to use in the field. 

According to Wells, “When residents put in work order requests on their online portal, it goes straight to pending work orders that will be assigned, or techs can pull it directly from the system and work on it.”. He adds that “because residents or staff members can send work orders directly, we’re able to complete the work quicker. We’ve also seen fewer duplicate work orders because in the past. A resident would call and tell the office they needed a work order, and then they might run into a maintenance engineer and tell them in person too, which would result in double work orders. TheWorxHub just makes it much more efficient.”  

Onboarding New Employees 

Before implementing TheWorxHub, Wells said onboarding new employees was a lengthy process. He had to get other departments, like information technology, involved to get each new employee set up in the system so they could access work orders and report updates. However, because TheWorxHub is so intuitive and easy to use, he is able to quickly set up new employees on his own. 

It’s much easier to onboard new employees because we no longer have to wait for IT or other departments to be available to help us.