P & L ASSOCIATES was formed in 1991 as a service to commercial property owners and management companies in reviewing and analyzing utility billings. During those early years, we concentrated on dealing with billing and rate issues and looking for areas that could be improved to reduce overall expense in this major category.

In 1992 a client asked if we could break down the utility bills for electric, natural gas and water/sewer and bill their tenants for usage. At that time many property owners and managers were trying to deal with high usages in their properties for areas like computer installations and higher than normal costs for manufacturing activities in leased spaces and there was a need to begin identifying those usages and costs.

We set up a billing system working with sub-meters and usage calculations and began billing those costs back to tenants and today, this is our primary focus. A majority of our clients and properties are located in the Minneapolis and St. Paul metropolitan area, we represent clients in other Midwest states also. The utility companies do not want to be involved in sub-meter billing as there is no advantage for them as they rely on their primary metering to capture the entire usage for a property but the owners and managers need a system in which they can offset their expense through tenant billing programs.

Over the past 26 years, we have seen this area grow at a steady rate and we expect that with utility costs rising at a high rate, more and more commercial property owners and managers will be looking a this as one way to reduce costs.

In addition to the benefit of a tenant billing program, we continue to analyze the billings looking for errors, metering problems, power factors, demand issues and other areas that need to be addressed to reduce costs.

We have also found over the years that in properties with multi-tenants that there are often questions as to which tenant is responsible for which meter and we will trace electric and gas lines to identify if the utility companies are billing the proper user. In nearly every building we visit, we find that the correct user is not always billed for the right service and this is especially in properties where demising walls change or there are a number of vacancies.

We can prepare a billing program based on our clients’ needs and offer these additional services for any type of commercial property.