Invoices, contracts and cost

Your energy invoices, read, checked and made usable

An energy invoice is not one more accounting document: it is often the only consumption data available on a site with no remote reading. You still have to be able to trust it. Softee grades every imported invoice against thirteen consistency rules, and tells you which one failed.

For energy managers, financial controllers and estate managers reconciling invoices from several suppliers, across several supply points, with periods that never fall neatly.

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What are the thirteen invoice control rules?

Every imported invoice is graded OK, warning or error against the thirteen rules below — five errors and eight warnings. These are not formatting checks: they are the mistakes you actually find in a batch of energy invoices.

  • invalid date
  • inconsistent total
  • inverted period
  • invalid consumption date
  • unit price inconsistency
  • probable duplicate
  • consumption outside contract
  • missing financial data
  • abnormal period
  • overlapping periods
  • inconsistent energy subtotal
  • missing reference
  • reference expressed in scientific notation

Why the last rule exists. Because a supply point number that has been through a spreadsheet becomes 1.23457E+13, and a silent reconciliation on a truncated reference is far worse than a rejected import.

That rule is the trace of a problem encountered, not of a specification written in advance. It is also why it is named here rather than counted into a total.

Which invoice formats can Softee read?

Four file formats: CSV, XLSX, JSON and PDF — the last by text extraction. ZIP decompression and base64 encoding are supported, which covers batch drops.

Twenty-two supplier invoice formats are preconfigured, created at installation, including a neutral Softee format. For a format not in that list, a field mapping ties the file’s columns to Softee’s fields, with transformations — conversion to integer, decimal, text or date, multiplication or division by a thousand, prefixing a zero, excluding the last day — and logical conditions. A new format is therefore wired up by configuration, without development.

Do invoices have to be uploaded by hand every month?

No. Two automatic retrieval modes exist: invoices dropped on an FTP server collected by a daily scheduled job, or retrieved through a supplier API. Manual upload remains available; it is simply not the only route.

What does Softee keep from an invoice’s detail?

The real detail, line by line: standing charge, energy and price by tariff band — HPH, HPE, HCH, HCE, Pointe —, services, taxes, capacity overrun, total before tax, VAT, total including tax, and the consumption period.

It is that level of detail that makes anything beyond a monthly total possible: the average price per kWh by band, the share of the standing charge in the invoice, the subscribed-capacity overrun, and the comparison of a single line between two suppliers or two sites. That is an analysis capability, not a promise of savings.

How does Softee handle duplicates, credit notes and multi-site invoices?

Duplicates are detected and can be deleted. Cancellations and credit notes are detected, and you choose to ignore them — an ignored invoice then carries the reason for its exclusion, on the record. Nothing disappears without leaving an explanation behind it.

An invoice covering several supply points is split into child virtual invoices, one per site concerned, and the operation is reversed if the split was wrong. That is the mechanism that attaches an invoice covering four buildings to the right one.

And contracts?

A contract is recorded with its reference, supply point, supplier, energy and start and end dates; it links to sensors and is consulted per site. Meters can be created directly from contracts.

The part that earns its keep day to day is the completeness check: Softee shows which contracts are incomplete, and that check can be exported. It is the prerequisite for any use of invoices — the “consumption outside contract” rule can detect nothing if the contract is not recorded. Finally, invoices can be used as a consumption data source in their own right, on the same footing as a remotely read meter, which is what allows a site with nothing but invoices to be monitored.

What this page does not claim

  • No energy supplier named. Twenty-two formats are preconfigured; we publish that count and its composition, not the brands. Naming energy suppliers would suggest a partnership that does not exist.
  • No invoice extraction by artificial intelligence. PDF extraction in the shipped product is deterministic text extraction by library.
  • No tariff compliance checking and no renegotiation advice. Softee checks an invoice’s internal consistency and its consistency with the recorded contract. It does not check a tariff against a market catalogue and does not recommend changing contract.

Frequently asked questions about invoices and contracts

Thirteen: five errors and eight warnings. Every imported invoice is graded OK, warning or error against: invalid date, inconsistent total, inverted period, invalid consumption date, unit price inconsistency, probable duplicate, consumption outside contract, missing financial data, abnormal period, overlapping periods, inconsistent energy subtotal, missing reference, and reference expressed in scientific notation.
CSV, XLSX, JSON and PDF, the last by text extraction. ZIP decompression and base64 encoding are supported. Twenty-two supplier formats are created at installation, including a neutral Softee format, and a field mapping with transformations and logical conditions allows a format absent from that list to be wired up by configuration, without development.
Yes, in two ways: invoices dropped on an FTP server are collected automatically by a daily scheduled job, or they are retrieved through a supplier API. Manual upload remains available alongside.
Yes. An invoice is a consumption data source in its own right, on the same footing as a remotely read meter. An invoice covering several supply points can also be split into child virtual invoices to allocate consumption across the sites concerned, and the operation is reversed if the split was wrong.
It detects inconsistencies, which is not quite the same thing, and the distinction is useful. The thirteen rules pick up an invoice’s internal contradictions — a total that does not follow its lines, a period that is inverted or overlaps the previous one, an inconsistent unit price, a probable duplicate — and discrepancies against the contract you have recorded. Softee does not compare your tariff against a market catalogue and does not conclude that an invoice is wrong: it shows you the ones you should not rely on without checking.
Duplicates are detected and can be deleted. Cancellations and credit notes are detected, and you choose to ignore them; an ignored invoice then carries the reason for its exclusion, on the record, so that a discarded invoice remains explicable later. The contract completeness check, which can be exported, also shows which contracts are incomplete — the prerequisite without which the “consumption outside contract” rule can find nothing.

Send us a batch of invoices

The most useful test we can run together: a real batch, put through the thirteen rules. You will see what the checks pick up — including what we had not anticipated, which happens and gets said.

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