Automated back-office, settlement & billing software solutions
Light, flexible and cost-effective settlement and billing solution for wholesale and retail energy operations. Eliminate operational risk and increase productivity by a fully automated back-office service
Challenges
Clients' profile. Entities trading financial, physical, wholesale and retail electricity and gas, and any energy type. Back-office and settlement managers across all energy industries, utilities, electric co-ops, electricity and gas retail marketers, generators, gas, oil and energy and commodities.
Target.
- Implement a light, cost-effective, robust and flexible back-office solution enabling the firm to move out of legacy billing systems that are cumbersome and expensive to maintain, in favor of modern scalable microservice architecture that can easily adapt and scale to your requirements as your market changes and your business grows.
- Offer these advantages:) available on the cloud, on-site or as a cloud service; b) no lengthy and costly implementation; c) easy and intuitive maintenance of transactions, data and valuation rules; d) flexible and robust settlement & billing for utilities and energy retail operations; e) easy integration with in-house ETRM, ERP, billing and accounting systems via flexible APIs.
explore QR BACK-OFFICE solutions
QR Back-Office is a high-performance scalable microservice developed in Java Spring Boot and interconnected with flexible APIs. This modern platform has been specially created for settlement and billing in electricity markets, wholesale and retail, utilities, gas, water, and any financial and physical energy trading. The platform is made of the following modules or services:
QR Workflow
Organize, validate, monitor and set approval chains across the back-office pipeline.
QR Data Validator
Validation and correction of all input data throughout the back-office and settlement processes.
QR Data Processor
Preprocessing of various types of data, e.g., meter into suitable formats for rates & settlement valuations.
QR Rate Calculator
Calculation of all charges and rates, e.g., energy, applicable to individual or sets of energy contracts.
QR Settlement
Configurable engine to handle simple to complex financial, wholesale and retail energy transactions.
QR Bill Exporter
API export of full settlement and bill calculation details to the desired format of billing & financial systems.
QR Workflow
A wizard allows you to create a custom workflow to organize complex chains of functions into step-by-step processes, guiding each staff, while enforcing data and process integrity, validation, control, and compliance.
Define via configuration, depending on the size and control requirements across your company, the key milestones or stages across the back-office pipeline, and the corresponding chain of control for different individuals, to monitor and approve transition across workflow stages. E.g., the data and meter manager uploads all data, validates, and must seek approval from a controller to push the data through rate calculation, etc.
Messaging services notify stakeholders of the progress and authorization to move to the next stage.
QR Data Validator
This service enforces data integrity by scanning and validating all the input data of various back-office modules and their calculations, and ensures all data are present, complete and correct.
The validator interface allows you to define fully general formulas and logical conditions for each data type.
Data validation can be performed across interlinked data sets. E.g., the presence and or correctness of a curve may depend on the values of another curve, or set of curves.
System Configuration
System Output
QR Data Processor
The goal of this service is to preprocess and get all data curves in the final state needed for various rates and settlement calculations. One example of such data is meter data.
You can define in a user-friendly interface any desired preprocessing mathematical rules for meter consumption and all other data curves, e.g., adding multiple meters.
System Configuration
System Output
QR Rate Calculator
Define in a user-friendly interface complex formulas to calculate energy and other rates (transmission, distribution, regulatory, etc) needed for settlement and bill calculation. You can define fully general formulas that may depend on market data curves, different fields, and parameters of multiple transactions (energy wholesale, retail, financial, distribution, etc), and many other factors.
Each energy deal may have its own rate depending on contract terms, or classes of deals with similar pricing plans may share rate formulas.
System Configuration
System Output
QR Settlement
This is at the heart of the back-office system and can be easily configured in a user-friendly interface.
This fully configurable mathematical engine can calculate an unlimited number of charges of any degree of complexity with many logical branching in the evaluation. No transaction or portfolio is too complex to handle.
Thanks to its high-performance multithreading architecture this service performs settlement calculations at lightning speed. E.g., hundreds of retail deals with series of 5-minute prices, rates and meter curves are settled for a month within minutes, on a standard server.
System Configuration
System Output
QR Bill Exporter
Once settlement is performed for a given transaction, this service arranges all the line items of bill calculation in any desired ledger format suitable for your billing and financial systems. Multiple export formats can be configured to satisfy different billing formats depending on subsidiaries or retail contracts requirements.
A special API service can be easily configured to export the final bill calculations data and ledgers to external billing and financial systems. These file formats are supported for export, csv, Excel, XML or Jason.
QR Back-Office Benefits & Features
Benefits:
QR Back-Office is a modern, light and highly scalable microservice, interconnected with flexible API services. They can be instantly scaled up to match the size of your operation and portfolio.
The modern microservice architecture allows us to easily configure and adapt each module or service to fit the growing and evolving needs of your wholesale and retail energy trading.
QR Back-Office can be installed on your private cloud or on-site, or be used as a cloud billing service where our team manages everything for you.
Typical clients are retail power and gas marketers, utilities and cooperatives, as well as any energy producer and trading firm.
Whether on-site, on the cloud, or a service, you pay one single annual fee for license, maintenance and upgrades, tailored to your portfolio size.
Integration of data, streamlining and automation of back-office functionality eliminate manual intervention and operational risk, while increasing productivity.
Features:
Ready out-of-the-box solution with numerous existing templates and vast configuration flexibility to handle complex energy portfolios with hybrid transactions, webs of master and tenant relationships, cross entity billing aggregation, billing adjustment reruns when some charges, rates or meter readings undergo manual revisions.
QR Data Hub and QR API services connect to financial and physical markets, energy exchanges and ISO data feeds, metering system and various other portals to fetch and upload data. Custom manual data loaders can be easily configured.
Multiple concurrent valuation rules can coexist on different data publications. E.g., preliminary and final settlements use their own end-of-month actualized meter and price data.
The back-office services and settlement are executed automatically on set schedules. Automated settlements are executed at multiple frequencies, ranging from end-of-day, using real-time data, all the way to end-of-month, based on actual final data. Independent shadow settlements, with variation reporting and configurable warning threshold.
