Safari Suite by EnSite
Safari Suite for Retail Energy Billing and Customer Care
EnSite Safari Suite® is a powerful multi-commodity software solution for retail energy billing and customer care. It is designed to enable growth for energy companies and service providers through a scalable platform and increased back room efficiency. EnSite Safari Suite provides access to information in one system to improve financial and operational decisions. Energy marketers use Safari to grow their business by leveraging in-house knowledge and expertise, achieving a competitive advantage through advanced customer and information management.
Safari Suite Customer Care
Safari CIS provides an intuitive, efficient dashboard for customer management, which translates into a competitive advantage through accurate and timely customer service.
Safari CIS (Customer Information System) improves customer management capabilities by providing a centralized view of customer information. Representatives have real-time access to contact information, retail energy billing history, account properties, contract and pricing information, accounts receivable status, historical usage and much more—all from a single interface.
Safari CIS helps improve customer retention by enabling you to provide outstanding real-time service. This includes tracking customer contact events and assigning specific user or department follow-up on each unresolved customer issue. Safari CIS helps facilitate growth in customer base through tracking prospect/sales activities and managing sales commissions.
Major Safari Customer Care Features
- Three-tier Customer Hierarchy for Corporate/Billing/Service Locations
- Customer "Snapshot" of Highly Relevant Data
- Customer Enrollment
- Historical Use Tracking1065
- Customer Service and Collections Call/Event Tracking, Management and Reporting
- Ad Hoc Reporting on Customer Data with Export to Excel®
- Unlimited Contacts
- Utility Services and Rate Tracking
- Manage Past Due Accounts for Collections
- Establish "Promise to Pay" terms
- Sales Force with Automated Commissions
- Automated Tasks Created for Departments/Users to handle customer issues
- Build/Update index or custom market-based pricing rates
Major Features
- Multi-cycle, multi-commodity consolidated billing
- Complex pricing and contract options including indexed, fixed, caps and collars, pricing triggers, etc.
- Estimated Billing with Automated Settlement for Marketer and Utility charges, as well as other charges and taxes
- Level payments with automated year-end settlement and parallel tracking of actual A/R
- Complex tax calculations including "tax on tax" charges or surcharges
- Automated Rate Ready/Bill Ready Utility Billing Options for the POR EDI model
- Custom Invoice Templates - one or many
- Bulk process PDF invoices by batch
- Automated e-mail service for PDF invoices
- Flexible A/R Reporting
- Automated payment application (FIFO) or managed application
- A/R History for CSRs
- Flexible interest calculation
- Manage payouts to Utilities, Suppliers and Sales Reps
Safari Suite Pricing and Billing
Safari Billing improves cash flow and customer retention through accurate and timely billing.
Invoicing and A/R for a New Retail Era
Safari Billing is a multi-commodity, customer-driven billing system developed specifically for the energy industry. The system supports innovative and flexible pricing products for commodity customers. With Safari Billing, invoicing complex energy pricing products involving tiers, trigger options and contract settlement becomes a seamless and automated process.
Safari Billing helps EnSite clients distinguish themselves from the competition through custom invoice design, branding and publishing options. It provides the flexibility necessary to operate in varied utility markets with automated processing based on established business rules, in addition to providing consolidated utility billing options.
Safari invoice batch processing is fully automated and flexible, allowing users to specify various batch criteria for automated selection of accounts to invoice. Or users may devise their own unique account groupings for an invoice batch. Invoice outputs include in-house printing or batch PDF delivery to a print service, as well as automated invoice PDF delivery to customer contacts flagged as invoice recipients.
Safari Reports and Data Extracts
EnSite Safari Suite provides robust report generation, customization and distribution options for screen-based reporting, multiple report outputs, and on-demand data extracts
Reports in Safari are managed at the Administration level in terms of which screens they are available from, user and user group report access permissions, etc. EnSite provides a series of standard reports and standard invoice templates, while most implementations also include custom reports and invoice templates.
Interface and Preview
The reporting interface provides user-friendly functionality, from the system level of database-driven report assignments and security reporting to end-user report generation and review at the main interface.
When reports are generated at any level of the system, the on-board report viewer provides easy navigation and data review, as well as a wide variety of report export options such as Excel®, PDF, RTF, HTML, etc.
On-Board Safari Report Types
Accounting Reports
Accounts Payable Reports
Aging Reports
Billing Reports
Contract Reports
Customer Reports
Gas Management Reports
Trading Reports
Usage Reports
Other Miscellaneous Reports
Data Extract Types
Accounts Receivable Data
Billing Data
Contract Data
Credit Data
Customer Data
GL Data
System Audit Data
Usage Data
Major Features
- Account Pooling
- Forecast fuel needs for prompt month and intra-month
- Daily/Monthly intra-month calendar or cycle-based balancing
- Utility logic for penalty avoidance
- Storage Optimization, Management and Trades
- Utility Rate and Operating Parameters
- Weather normalization
- Utility Nominations
- Utility Uploads for Nomination Files
- Utility meter read file imports
- Supply Volume Management by Supplier, Pipeline, Point, Upstream Contract Number
- Auto-allocate Supply to Market
- Pipeline Nominations
Safari Suite Gas Management
The Safari Utility and Gas Management system is a nomination, balancing and supply management system built for the diverse operating rules of any utility market.
Manage Forecasts, Nominations and Supply
The Safari Utility and Gas Management system is a nomination, balancing and supply management system built for the diverse operating rules of any utility market. Safari Gas Management saves time and reduces errors by integrating and automating the processes of forecasting, meter data collection, daily/monthly balancing, storage management and optimization, and nominations.
Safari EDI Automation
Safari EDI provides automated transaction management and validation for incoming and outgoing transactions, with robust features for user review of EDI functions, fully automated file transfer, automated invoicing, and much more.
EnSite Safari Suite is designed to manage high-volume data transactions in and out of the system for Utility EDI processing. To accomplish this, the software features a specialized Utility Data Interface (UDI), file import/export protocols, and data validation protocols to support processing of standard EDI transactions between the energy marketer and utilities in their operating regions.
This UDI component allows the definition, import and export of data related to common utility-marketer transactions, including enrollment, metering, billing, payments, and others. It utilizes a common XML data interface format, which can be mapped both incoming and outgoing to virtually any defined file format.
EnSite converts EDI data to and from the Utility format by way of your third-party EDI provider. Incoming Utility transaction files (XML or Text files) received from the EDI provider are automatically processed in the EnSite Safari Suite® server environment to ensure valid data has been received, with exceptions managed by the user at the software’s Utility Data Interface screens for review and, if applicable, re-processing into the Safari database. For outgoing transactions, EnSite Safari Suite® processes day-to-day account management and billing functions into transaction files staged for export at the main UDI screen. These files are then exported to the EDI provider for translation into the appropriate Utility file type for validation and processing on the Utility end.
Using this process, the EnSite Safari Suite® user has the ability to manage high-volume transaction data into the Safari system to, for example, enroll accounts, change account data, populate historical usage, record payments, process Utility Rate Ready invoice data, etc. For export, the system will prepare high-volume enrollment, change, and drop requests; and Bill Ready invoice data.
Account Transactions Supported
Enrollment Request
Enrollment Response
Historical Use Request
Historical Use Response
Change Request
Change Response
Drop Request
Drop Response
Reinstatement Request
Reinstatement Response
Usage Transactions Supported
Historical Usage
Gas Profile
Monthly Usage
Invoice Transactions Supported
Bill Ready
Rate Ready
Code Rate Ready
Dual Bill
Financial Transactions Supported
Payment (and Payment Fee)
Safari Systems Integration
Safari dynamically integrates with utilities, vendors, and internal systems.
EnSite built the EnSite Safari Suite application to dynamically integrate with multiple business partners and internal applications.
EnSite has a proven track record of implementing effective communications between EnSite Safari Suite and third-party systems using our Integration Layer. The Integration Layer allows transactional data to be mapped to APIs for validation and upload into EnSite Safari Suite. The system offers many standard datasets for extraction and customized sets can be defined via the Integration Layer.
Built-in automation allows the scheduling of uploads, extracts, workflows, and other integration activities.
Real World Results
EnSite Safari Suite integrates with many third-party applications such as utility systems, Sage Accounting, JD Edwards, Lawson, Endur, Entegrate, SalesForce.com, Prophet X, E-Signal, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Speedpay, and national EDI vendors.
The Integration Layer features and capabilities comprise an impressive amount of inter-system communication and automation, resulting in time saved, errors avoided, and ease of record management.