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Englewood staff demonstrate Power BI billing dashboard to rebuild customer trust
Summary
Staff and consultants showed a Power BI billing dashboard that combines legacy and new billing data, allows drilldown to individual accounts and monthly charges, and will be used internally by customer service to investigate anomalies; rollout to staff is planned after training.
Staff and consultants demonstrated a new Power BI billing dashboard designed to combine historic billing data with the new billing and AMI meter reads to improve billing transparency and support customer service.
Sarah Stone, deputy director for business solutions and engineering, said Englewood contracted Hazen and Sawyer to build a dynamic tool that allows staff to compare charges and consumption before and after the August 2024 billing system switch and to drill down from systemwide trends to individual account monthly charge breakdowns. Sarah Wozniak, a Hazen digital solutions developer, demonstrated filtering and aggregation features (monthly, quarterly, annual), and showed how staff can search by account number or address to display usage and each line on a bill (admin fee, capital improvement fee, water usage, etc.).
Staff described examples where AMI replacements and timing caused apparent anomalies: one customer had no water charge in December 2024 because the meter retrofit moved that usage into January 2025; another example showed how AMI timing produced estimates and subsequent corrections. The dashboard can visualize those issues and produce screenshots staff can share with customers.
Staff said the dashboard combines exports from both the old and new billing systems to form a continuous three‑year usage profile. Sarah Stone said the tool was developed in direct response to customer concerns after the billing conversion and AMI rollout and is intended to help rebuild trust by making trends and individual bill components easily visible.
Next steps: staff intend to train customer service staff and Hazen will provide training; staff expect to begin using the tool in roughly one month after training. Staff also said billing system notes and adjustments remain in the primary billing system and that the dashboard is an internal analytics and customer‑service tool (the dashboard will not be published on customer bills). Staff said they can use the tool to find accounts that went months without billed reads and to support payment plans and account resolutions when large corrective bills occur.
Ending: Staff said the dashboard will be refreshed with regular exports and will become a routine customer service resource for investigating billing anomalies and communicating with customers.
