Two days of billing work every month
The property manager oversaw a mixed commercial building with more than 40 individual tenancy meters. Every billing cycle, the process was the same: walk each meter, record the reading, return to the office, calculate usage against the previous reading, apply the tariff, and type the result into a Xero invoice for each tenant. The process took roughly 16 hours per month — two full working days — and was entirely dependent on one person who understood how it all worked. Any mistake meant a corrected invoice and a conversation with the tenant.
Connecting the meters to the platform
Conexie assessed the existing metering infrastructure and specified pulse-output data loggers compatible with the installed meters. The installation was completed over a weekend to minimise disruption to tenants. Within 48 hours of installation, all 40+ meters were reporting live readings to the Conexie platform. The first month's consumption data was verified against manual reads to confirm accuracy before billing was handed over to the automated pipeline.
Configuring the billing rules
Each tenancy had its own tariff structure — some on flat rates, some with time-of-use components, some with shared-area cost allocations. Conexie's billing configuration captured all of these rules per tenancy, including the correct Xero contact mapping, account codes, and invoice line item descriptions. Once configured, the billing engine applied the rules to each meter's interval data automatically and produced draft invoices in Xero at the end of each billing period.
From two days to fifteen minutes
The first fully automated billing cycle required the property manager to spend 15 minutes reviewing the draft invoices — checking the flagged items (typically one or two per cycle where consumption had deviated significantly from the previous period) and approving the batch. No data entry. No spreadsheet. No meter walks. The time savings compounded quickly: 16 hours per month recovered, redirected to property management activities that couldn't be automated.
Error elimination and audit confidence
Beyond the time saving, the shift to automated billing eliminated the transcription errors that had been an occasional source of tenant friction. Every invoice now traces back to timestamped meter readings in the Conexie platform, and the property manager can answer any tenant query about a bill in seconds by pulling up the relevant interval data. The audit trail that had previously existed only in handwritten meter notebooks is now a searchable digital record.