Lucid Launches Advanced Budgeting App for BuildingOS Platform

OAKLAND, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 22, 2016) - Lucid, provider of the market-leading BuildingOS platform for building management, today announced a new version of BuildingOS Budgeting, an application within the BuildingOS Finance and Planning Package. BuildingOS Budgeting empowers organizations to transform how they create, track performance against, and report on electricity, gas, water, and other utility budgets for their building portfolio, delivering time savings, visibility, transparency and traceability.

Budget creation, tracking and reporting can be prohibitively time consuming and inaccurate. It can take hours to days per building to create a fiscal year budget for a single building, a process that if done manually can include consolidating bills from the previous year to use as a starting point and then adjusting for expected rate changes, conservation and efficiency projects, occupancy changes, and other factors. Moreover, it's often difficult to trace decisions to understand how a colleague or consultant built and updated the budget. Finally, creating role-specific, intuitive budgeting reports and visualizations can be cumbersome and can take a great deal of time, hindering prompt decision-making.

BuildingOS Budgeting gets budgeting out of spreadsheets and brings it into the twenty first century. The app breaks down data silos and gives more stakeholders access to shared data, dramatically improving the speed and accuracy of budget creation, and fostering collaboration across disciplines to impact bottom line performance. Now professionals from operations to energy and finance have visibility into budgeting components so they can collaborate more effectively to achieve their goals. BuildingOS Budgeting delivers the following benefits:

• Time savings: Dramatically decrease the time spent creating budgets, calculating end-of-quarter and end-of-year projections and building reports. BuildingOS delivers time savings by automatically importing bills from more than 1,900 utilities, eliminating the need to compile bill information manually, and enabling users to import consumption and blended rates from previous years' bills with a single click. Users can also easily budget for rate increases by applying an increase to all utility accounts on a rate schedule with just a few clicks.
• Visibility and collaboration: Sophisticated auto-generated reports allow users to view reports tailored to their needs for an unlimited number of individuals on a team, fostering better communication and collaboration.
• Traceability and transparency: All changes to budgets are fully tracked and visibly tagged, enabling users to easily identify exactly where cost and consumption adjustments were made. Users can restore data to original values at any time without losing the history of edits. The app provides full transparency into and control over how each monthly value in their budgets and predictions were calculated, reducing rework and confusion.
• Accuracy: Organizations can increase budget and fiscal year projection accuracy by eliminating manual entry error, using bill-by-bill blended rates from previous years to calculate costs, and incorporating other cost and consumption adjustments. Auto-calculation results in more accurate end-of-month and end-of-year projections.

"Using the BuildingOS Budgeting app to create monthly or quarterly reports of our 'burn rate' against our projections and our budget is a useful way to monitor the energy spend," said Martha Larsen, manager of campus energy and sustainability at Carleton College. "It gets everyone out of spreadsheets, which is a good thing!"

"The intelligent buildings market is beginning to mature. Customers are looking for solutions that leverage data for better decision-making," said Casey Talon, principal research analyst, Navigant Research. "Software-driven tools empower building operators with the information they need to improve productivity, and these business improvements can change their position to that of strategic influencers in their organizations."

"Lucid continues to set the bar for advanced building management solutions," said Will Coleman, CEO of Lucid. "BuildingOS Budgeting turns manual, time-consuming processes into dynamic and integrated workflows that save time and encourage engagement and collaboration. What was once a siloed activity now brings building management and finance teams together, so they can make informed decisions quickly and accurately."

Additional Resources:

• Stay ahead of the curve by reading the Connected Buildings Blog: https://www.lucidconnects.com/library/connected-buildings-blog
• Follow Lucid on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

About Lucid:
Lucid provides a data and analytics platform to make data-driven decisions to improve building efficiency and portfolio performance. Lucid's SaaS-based BuildingOS platform has over 500 customers, 11,000 buildings and one billion square feet under management and empowers teams across finance, operations and sustainability to collaborate to get the best from their buildings. For more information, visit https://lucidconnects.com/.