Trade Capture Unleashes Complex Commodity Cost Validation

With the growing demand for flexibility in energy contracts, we have seen an increase in the available mechanisms for businesses to buy and sell the commodity element of their contracts. These new ‘trading’ options have brought with them more complexity for energy managers. 

For example, some contracts at the sharp end of the market will now offer customers the option to purchase energy on multiple time horizons; from years ahead of delivery down to a few hours ahead of delivery and even further, with real-time price optimisation via Grid operator managed Balancing Mechanism markets.

When coupled with smart hedging and optimisation strategies, trading in such a way can provide great value to businesses. However, they also bring with them added challenges when it comes to understanding and validating invoices. 

At Captrics, our Contract Management & Invoice Validation software is designed to decipher the complexity, do the number crunching for you and ensure that your bills are 100% accurate. We believe that thorough, automated validation of invoices should be an essential component of any flexible energy procurement or sales strategy. After all,  if you’re not going to check that your invoice correctly matches your optimisation activities, what is the point of optimising in the first place?!

Here we take a look at our latest Captrics feature and explore how it can help you manage your business energy contracts.

Trade Capture

Our new Trade Capture feature enables the recording of trades undertaken within flexible contracts. The feature includes:

  • Multi-Product – Electricity and Gas contracts commonly have flexible purchasing options and we have pre-configured these for our users. However, our dynamic infrastructure allows us to add any products required; Carbon, Water, Widgets… whatever your requirement, we can provide a solution.   
  • Multi-Market – No matter if your contracts cover the UK, Netherlands or countries further afield, our software can help.
  • Standardised & Bespoke Trading Products – Pre-configuration of standard trading products for your local market. Bespoke trades spanning any time period can also easily be added.
  • ‘Add Trade’ Wizard – Our easy to use user interface makes it easy for you to log trades in our portal and add all the important trade metrics that you require. 
  • Intuitive User Interface – Our UI provides full traceability with easy to understand overview tables and the ability to edit trades on demand. Extract data via in screen Excel exports or utilise our API access.

Traded Position

Adding a trade to the Captrics portal automatically updates your contractual traded position, ensuring that an accurate record is stored that can be used for validation.

  • Trade Mapping – Our trade processing tools will automatically map your trades to your traded position on a per Settlement Period basis, regardless of if you choose to trade standardised or bespoke products.
  • Trading Software Integration – Using different software for your trading and risk management? No problem, we can integrate external systems to flow data through our validation engine. Take a look at our previous blog for an example integration with the Jules Energy’s Platforms (in association with Smartest Energy, ENGIE, Flexitricity & TotalEnergies).
  • Position Overview – View a breakdown of your traded position, per Settlement Period for all trades. External data will be aggregated with trades registered directly in Captrics for a complete position overview. 
  • Data Exports – Export your trades or traded position to Excel or fetch data using our APIs. 

Invoice Validation

The important bit! The primary reason for capturing your trades is to enable a complete validation of your flexible contracts. Once loaded, your trades are automatically fed into Captrics’ powerful validation engine, along with all of your contract settings. Our thorough validation process will automatically check your invoice against your trading activities and imbalance to ensure that all charges have been correctly calculated and you don’t lose any value from your trading optimisation.

  • Validation – A complete check of all flexible purchasing invoice components. 
  • Trading Premiums – Account for any contractual premiums such as charges for trading against published indexes. 
  • Complex Contract Configurations – No matter how your contract is configured, our flexible validation engine can be used to validate all of your invoice components. 
  • Transparent Reporting – All error flagging is complimented with insightful backing data to help you quickly and easily get to the bottom of any discrepancies. 
Trade_1
1) Trade Capture
  • 'Add Trade' wizard with standardised products makes for easy trade entry.
  • Configure multiple products, indexes and trade types to match your contract options.
  • Add bespoke trades covering any period.
  • Attach trade confirmation emails or reports.
Trade_2
2) Traded Position
  • View your traded position on an individual or aggregate basis.
  • Export data to Excel or CSV via the user interface or make use of Captrics' API services.
Trade_3
3) Invoice Validation
  • Automated validation of even the most complex trading charges.
  • Configure trading premiums, indexes and imbalance charges to match your contract.
  • Validation errors are flagged and supplemented with helpful insight to get to the root cause of any discrepancy.

And More To Come!

This is the first release of our Trade Capture feature, we have many future developments planned and would welcome any suggestions for more ideas! In the roadmap we have:

  1. Position Charts – Simple, easy to read charts showing your current traded position.
  2. Index Tariff Validation – Trading against an Index? We have already integrated price feeds for some of the most commonly traded indexes and we can use this data to check that you are getting the price you are contracted to. We plan to add more indexes as we build out the capabilities.
  3. Trade Importer – Prefer to bulk upload trades to our portal? No problem, we can add import capability for the likes of CSV, Excel, APIs or other file types on request.