Electricity Broker Management System:
A Case Study in Custom Retail Energy Software
The Problem
This client is one of Texas’ largest retail energy brokers.
The sales process for an energy broker requires gathering up to 7000 points of data from customers, utilities, and electricity providers. This data comes to the retail energy provider in several mutually incompatible formats that require special handling to make the data usable and consistent.
Prior to engaging Entrance Software, their brokers analyzed and stored this information in hard copy or in Microsoft Excel and delivered quotes and estimates to customers in numerous proprietary spreadsheet formats. Reporting styles were inconsistent between brokers, making quality control difficult.
After the customer data is gathered and analyzed, the brokers obtain quotes from many retail electricity providers. These quotes come in a different format from each provider, and require extensive manipulation before quotes from different providers can be compared.
Finally, when brokers close a deal they receive a commission. Prior to engaging Entrance Software, the commission was calculated using off-the-shelf accounting software that had been modified to gather and track commission information, but provided no connectivity to enterprise accounting software and did no data validation at all. Commissions were difficult to calculate, and forecasting cash flows involved a tedious manual process.
This energy services provider asked Entrance Software to develop an application that would serve as a sales support tool, to free brokers from the tedious tasks of data collection, analysis, and reporting, and spend more time servicing their clients.
The Custom Software Solution
Entrance Software developed an end-to-end, web-based application that imports historical usage data for customers and presents this information in an easy-to-use format. The workflow is standardized into an intuitive user interface that validates data entry and catches errors before they reach the customer.
Brokers are able to collect and track quotes from any provider in the same interface, which standardizes the quote terms and generates a variety of reports that can be handed directly to the customer or used to compare estimated savings from the various providers.
When a deal is closed, customer information and the deal terms are imported directly into the deal sheet, avoiding data re-entry and the associated delays and inaccuracies.
Deal information, including commission, is captured once and flows through to the accounting system (Microsoft Dynamics SL) for faster payments and reduced time and expense.
