For operators of 8+ sites
Your utility bills are wrong. Almost nobody checks.
We read the invoices line by line against the filed tariff, find the billing errors, and file to recover them. You pay 35% of what actually comes back. If nothing comes back, you owe nothing.
Start with one property, free Size it yourself first
Why the errors are there
A multi-site operator receives hundreds of invoices a month from dozens of utilities, each billing under a tariff document that runs to hundreds of pages and changes without notice. Accounts payable checks that the amount is plausible and pays it. Nobody re-derives the charge from the rate schedule, because doing that at scale is tedious, unglamorous work that no one is staffed for.
So the errors accumulate quietly, month after month, on autopay.
The four that pay for the engagement
We check about thirty defect classes. These four carry most of the money in hospitality and multi-site portfolios, and each has its own calculator so you can size your own exposure before you talk to us.
Sewer charges on water that never reaches the sewer
Sewer is almost always billed as a flat percentage of metered water. But cooling-tower evaporation, irrigation, and pool make-up leave as vapor or into the ground — they never enter the sanitary system. Most utilities have a defined process to deduct that volume. Most operators have never filed for it, and the credit is frequently retroactive.
Rate schedule misclassification
The single most common defect we find, and the most valuable, because it recurs every month until someone catches it. A property gets assigned a rate schedule at construction or acquisition based on a load profile it no longer has — and then nobody revisits it for a decade. On a portfolio, the same wrong schedule is usually replicated across dozens of accounts.
Demand ratchets anchored to a spike you used once
Many commercial tariffs set your billing demand to a percentage of your highest peak in the trailing eleven or twelve months. One failed control sequence, one commissioning test, one metering artifact — and you pay for that capacity every month for a year. Sometimes the spike was real. Often it was not, and the tariff has a correction path.
Circuits still billing years after they were cut
Analog lines for elevators, fire panels, fax, and alarm circuits at properties that were renovated, rebranded, or sold. The carrier keeps billing because nobody told it to stop. Forward savings are immediate; back-credit is capped by the carrier's dispute window, which is why the clock matters more than the amount.
How it starts: one property, no cost, no obligation
- You send three months of utility bills for a single property. PDFs are fine. No system access, no credentials, no contract.
- We return a written findings memo. What is wrong, what we think it is worth, and the specific filing path to recover it — with the tariff section cited so your team can check our work.
- If there is nothing there, we tell you that. Plainly, in writing. You have lost a few PDFs and gained a clean bill of health you can show your owners.
- If you want us to pursue it, we sign an authorization letter and go get it. 35% of what is actually recovered, invoiced after the credit posts to your account.
What we will not do
These are the boundaries a finance officer actually cares about, so we state them before you ask.
- We do not broker or procure energy supply. Not as an add-on, not through a partner. Supply brokering is a licensed activity in several states and it puts the adviser's incentives against the client's. We audit and recover. That is the whole business.
- We do not touch your service, contracts, or providers. Our authorization is read-only access to billing records and the right to file a claim on your behalf. It carries no authority to change, move, or terminate anything.
- We do not file tax refund claims unilaterally. Sales-tax recovery requires your own signature and a state power of attorney per claim. It is billed as a separate, gated line item, never bundled into a blanket contingency.
- We do not resell or retain your data. Billing records are used for your engagement and returned or destroyed on request.
What we can and cannot tell you yet
The percentages on this site — the 3–8% error band, the frequency of each defect class — come from published industry audit literature, not from an independent study and not from our own client results. We use them for sizing, not as a promise. The only number that matters for your portfolio is the one that comes off your own invoices, which is exactly why the first property is free.
Our calculators show their arithmetic for the same reason. You should be able to check every figure we put in front of you.
Who we work with
Portfolios of eight or more sites with meaningful combined utility and telecom spend and no in-house energy manager. In practice that means hotel management companies, senior living operators, multi-unit franchisees, self-storage platforms, and multi-family managers. The work scales with meter count and account sprawl, not with industry — a thirty-property manager and a thirty-store franchisee have the same problem.
We also verify hospitality for-sale listings
The same claims-vs-evidence discipline applies to buying a business, not just paying its bills. We score the claims in an inn, hotel, motel, or campground for-sale listing — verifiable, unverifiable, or missing — and say what evidence would settle each one. Across 15 currently-listed New England lodging and campground businesses, 58.8% of the material claims we scored are unverifiable or missing as published. See the live scorecard. Verification only — we never broker, negotiate, or take a success fee.
Provenance
Findings memos and action receipts issued by Corbelworks are signed with an Ed25519 key so their contents can be verified independently later. The public key is published at /provenance-public-key.json; any receipt can be checked against it. We hold ourselves to the evidence standard we would want from a vendor.
Who you are dealing with
Corbelworks is the utility and telecom recovery practice of Signalry, Inc., 15 Hacket Way, Kittery, ME 03904. Reach us at ethan@signalry.ai.
We are not affiliated with your utility, your telecom carrier, or any regulator or government agency, and no message from us should be read as coming from one. We do not sell energy, broker supply contracts, or take a commission from any supplier. We audit bills and file to recover billing errors, and that is the whole business.
What it costs. A first review of three months of bills for one property is free and you get the written findings either way, including a finding of nothing. If you ask us to pursue a recovery and it comes back, we charge 35% of the amount recovered. Tax refund claims are quoted separately, because they require your signature and a state power of attorney on each claim and the fee rules differ by state.
The analysis is AI-assisted. Software does the first pass across your bills; the defect classes it tests are published on what we check. Nothing is filed on your behalf without your review and signature.
The calculators on this site run entirely in your browser. Bill figures you type into them are never transmitted to us or to anyone else.
What we do not have. No Certified Energy Manager on staff. No named client references yet, because the practice is new. If a recovery needs a licensed professional, such as a contested tax claim or a formal proceeding, we say so and bring one in rather than pretending we can do it. If any of that is disqualifying for you, it should be, and you should not have to dig for it.