‍By Ali Sarilgan, Co-Founder & CEO, TrueMeter

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When I was running finance and accounting at GameStop, we had 4,500 locations across dozens of countries. That added up to thousands of utility bills per month. We needed someone to manage them, so we hired a bill-pay agent. 

We paid them close to $1 million a year. Do you know how much they found us in savings on our bills? 

Zero. All they did was pay our bills on time. 

I didn't fully appreciate how broken that arrangement was until I started building TrueMeter. Now that I spend every day thinking about what utility bill management should actually look like, I've made it my personal mission to make sure every CFO knows:

The model most large organizations are using is costing them far more than they realize.

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What Does a Bill Pay Agent Actually Charge You?

The fee structure is straightforward, and that's part of the problem. Most traditional bill pay agents charge $10–$15 per invoice processed. At face value, that sounds reasonable.

Until you do the math on a multi-location operator:

• 100 locations x 2 utility bills each (electric + gas) = 200 invoices/month
• At $12/invoice: $2,400/month, or roughly $29,000/year
• 500 locations: ~$144,000/year
• 2,000+ locations (like GameStop) = about $576K per year, and larger chains with 3,000-4,000 locations can approach or exceed $1M per year

These amounts are far from a rounding error. 

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What You're Actually Getting for That Fee

To be fair to the bill pay model, it solves a real operational problem. When you have hundreds of utility accounts across multiple states, someone has to log into each portal, pull the invoice, verify the amount, and initiate payment before the due date. That's tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone at scale.

Bill pay agents automate or staff that process, essentially serving as accounts payable outsourcing for utilities. And for a finance team that's drowning in invoices, this support is genuinely useful.

But useful and optimal are not the same thing.

Here's what traditional bill pay agents are not doing:

• Auditing each invoice for billing errors, meter misreads, or rate misclassifications
• Checking whether your locations are on the correct rate plan for their usage profile
• Monitoring contract expiration dates for energy suppliers in deregulated markets
• Running competitive procurement auctions to secure lower commodity rates
• Flagging when a utility applies a new surcharge that shouldn't apply to your account type
• Identifying when you're paying a bill for a location you no longer occupy

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They're processing your bills instead of working on your bills.

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The Structural Reason This Happens

This isn't a knock on the people at these firms. It's a structural limitation of how the service is designed. Traditional bill pay agents make money on volume, so the more invoices they process, the more they earn. Their incentive is throughput instead of optimization. 

Saving you money requires a fundamentally different capability: deep line-item analysis across thousands of bills, knowledge of utility rate structures in every market you operate in, and the ability to run competitive supplier auctions when you're in a deregulated state. That's a different business entirely. 

The other constraint is data. A traditional agent receives your bill as a PDF, confirms the amount, and pays it. They're not ingesting line-item data, running anomaly detection, or cross-referencing your rate plan against current tariff schedules. That level of analysis requires technology — specifically, the ability to standardize and process billing data from hundreds of utilities that each format their invoices differently.

It's a genuinely hard data problem, and it's one most bill pay vendors haven't solved.

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What the Difference Looks Like in Practice: CloudKitchens

CloudKitchens operates roughly 90 ghost kitchen warehouses across the U.S. and their annual energy spend is approximately $28 million. For three years, they worked with a large, well-regarded bill pay agent.

Over those three years, that vendor found them $27,000 in savings. On a $28M annual spend, that's essentially zero.

Then TrueMeter came in. In year one, we identified $1.2 million in savings. We didn't work longer hours. The difference was what we could see that they couldn't. 

Their vendor was processing summaries. We ingest line-item billing data from 190 utilities and run continuous anomaly detection. We're looking for rate misclassifications, billing errors, expired supplier contracts, and opportunities to run competitive procurement auctions in deregulated markets. And we find things in the data that a bill-pay-only model was never designed to find.

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The CFO's Question

If you're a CFO currently working with a bill pay agent, or evaluating whether to hire one, you need to ask yourself: 

"Is paying bills on time all we need from them?" 

For a 50-location operator, the bill pay fee might be manageable. But if that same vendor is processing your invoices, collecting their per-invoice fee, and leaving 10-15% in savings on the table every month, the math starts to look different. Their fee is an opportunity cost. 

The most expensive version of utility bill management is paying $1M a year for a service that was never designed to save you money, and accepting that arrangement because no one ever questioned it.

We built TrueMeter because I lived that arrangement for years, and I knew there was a better way to do this.

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