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About the Cost Contribution Report

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This report provides a way to perform a comparison of rate cost components across a variety of rates. Rate categories, as defined in Create A Rate (for details, refer to "About Create A Rate") are used to group the components into general categories. For example, a rate may have several components, such as: On Peak Demand, Off peak Demand, Partial Peak Demand, and Historical Ratchet. Each of these four components can be grouped into a “demand” category and compared to sites that have rates that may only have a single constant demand component.

You can aggregate meters to get regional, divisional, or other grouped sites in the same stacked bar. When meters are aggregated in Cost Contribution, the costs for each meter are computed individually using applicable tariff rate and billing cycles for each – then aggregated. The individual rate categories are totaled to provide aggregated costs broken down by demand, consumption, other, UDF, and total.

This is important for two reasons:

• users will often aggregate meters that have different rates
• aggregated loads applied to a rate will have characteristics that are different from a single rate and may generate false positives for ratchets, rebates, and other rate components.

For example, if Site A Main-Electric and Site B Main-Electric are aggregated and applied to a rate that is designed for a single facility, the peak and total consumption for the aggregate point is excessive and the report displays invalid cost information.

You can report on a single billing cycle or multiple billing cycles. If you want to view costs for Q1, select January as the reporting period, then define “3” in the Consecutive Billing Cycles entry field. In this case, the costs are computed for individual meters for individual months.

You can compare costs to historical costs for the same meter using baselining. For example, if you run a report for three sites for Q1 2004 and would like to see how the total costs compare to the previous year, compare the two side-by-side by selecting the Baseline option.

Figure 4-27 Cost Contribution Report Example.

Creating a Cost Contribution Report.

Create an Cost Ranking Report by performing the following tasks:

• Start the Report
• Select the Data Points to Chart
• Set Report Parameters

Start the Report

1. Launch shortBrandName from your browser using the following URL:http://hostname/eas
   where hostname is the name or IP address of the Web Supervisor.
2. Enter appropriate login information to gain access to the home page.

   Note: From within an existing report, it is easier to simply use the Goto: menu on the upper right to select the desired report, as an alternative to the following step.

3. From the home page, open Cost Contribution by clicking on the Cost Contribution link. The Cost Contribution report template displays.

   Note: If you desire, from within an existing report, it is easier to simply use the Goto Reports Pull-down menu on the upper right to select the desired report.

Select the Data Points to Chart

1. The tree displays sites and points as filtered by the Site Filter drop down list. In the site tree, right click on the data point or meter and select Add to Report. The data point or meter is added to the Selection window.

   Note: If you select a site or a meter and do an Add to Report, the software will key off of the first data point in the group, and all data points of that same type, subordinate to that selection, will be added to the Selection window as an aggregated point.

   Note: At any time after adding a point to the Selection window, you may view the point’s attached rates by right-clicking the point and selecting “View Attached Rates” from the shortcut menu, as shown in Figure 4-28.

Figure 4-28 Viewing Attached Rates from the Cost Contribution Report Selection Window.

2. Repeat adding data points or copying and pasting data points until you have all of the points in the report that you want to chart.

Set Report Parameters

1. In the Cost Contribution frame, set the Cost Considered option to use one of the following options: “Actual Costs” or “Calculated Costs”.
2. In the Billing Period group, select the starting billing period for the data and enter the number of subsequent billing cycles to include.
3. In the Baseline group, clear the “Show Baseline” option. Use this option and set a date when you want to compare cost contributions to a previous billing period.
4. In the Normalization frame, set your desired parameters. If you want to normalize for Floor area, for weather, or production, refer to "Types of Normalization", for details.
5. Click on Run Report to create the report. Figure 4-29 is an example of a Cost Ranking report using sample data.

Figure 4-29 Example Cost Contribution Report.