How to compare business electricity without a broker call

You need one recent electricity bill and about a minute. Upload it, and the published plans available at your site are priced against your own usage and ranked by what they would cost you across a year, with no form asking for a good time to ring you.

The rest of this page is the method: what the bill has to show, what a comparison can and cannot tell you, how to check the one you are looking at, and the cases where picking up the phone is genuinely the better move.

Can you compare business electricity without talking to anyone?

Yes, for a single site buying published plans, which is most small businesses. Everything you would be brokered towards is already published, and choosing between published plans is arithmetic rather than negotiation.

The part that has to be done for you is the arithmetic itself, because a business bill carries a tariff structure, a usage split and often a demand line, and comparing those across a market of plans by hand is a genuinely tedious afternoon. That is the work worth automating. It is not work that requires a conversation.

What do you need in front of you to compare a business bill?

One recent bill, and preferably a full one rather than a summary or a reminder notice. A photo of the paper bill is fine.

What the comparison actually reads off it: the usage in each time-of-use window if you are on a time-of-use tariff, the daily supply charge, the rates for each component, the tariff or tariff code your site sits on, the network, and the demand or capacity line if there is one. A tariff code is the identifier your distributor uses for the specific network tariff assigned to your site, and it is the single most useful string on the bill, because it fixes which structure everything else has to be priced against.

If you cannot find those, how to read a business electricity bill walks a business bill line by line and names each one.

What is the difference between a bill review and a comparison?

Both start by reading your bill, and it is worth being straight about that: a broker or a retailer offering a free bill review really does read the bill, and often reads it competently. The differences are who reads it, what set of plans it gets measured against, and when you get the answer.

A bill review is human-mediated, which means somebody looks at your bill and comes back to you. It is scoped to whatever that party can sell you, which for a broker is a panel and for a retailer is its own plans. And it is scheduled, which means the answer arrives at a time that suits the process, commonly within a business day and commonly attached to a call.

A comparison of the kind on this site is instant, self-serve and scoped to the published plans available at your address rather than to a panel. You read the result yourself, on a screen, and nobody needs to ring you to explain it.

Neither shape is dishonest. They are different machines with different outputs. One produces an offer somebody selected for you; the other produces a ranked list you selected from. What matters is knowing which one you are being handed, because a review that models your usage on one provider's own tariffs is answering a narrower question than the one you probably asked.

What is a panel, and why does it change the answer?

A panel is the defined set of retailers a party has commercial arrangements with and can therefore place you on, as distinct from every retailer authorised to sell electricity to your site.

Being a panel is ordinary and it is not evidence of bad faith. It is a hard limit on what the comparison can mean. The plans that cannot be sold to you are not in it, so the cheapest option on a panel is the cheapest option on that panel, which is a different claim from the cheapest option available to your site. The two coincide only when the panel happens to contain the market.

We build from the Australian Government's Consumer Data Right register, the same source behind Energy Made Easy, rather than from a panel, and we show the plans we earn nothing from beside the ones we do. Why that is the case, and what we are paid, is on how we make money. For the mechanics of how the panel model is funded, how business energy brokers get paid sets it out properly.

How do I check whether a comparison covers the whole market?

Ask what set it compares, and read the footer. Three questions settle it.

Ask how many retailers can be placed through it, and how many are authorised to sell to your site. The gap between those two numbers is the part of the market you are not being shown. Ask what happens if the best plan for your site sits with a retailer outside that set. And look for a stated disclosure about commercial relationships affecting which plans appear, which is standard wording, usually in the footer, and the most useful sentence on any comparison page.

Where comparison sites in this market have gone wrong before, and how to test one, is the subject of are energy comparison sites accurate.

What should I check on the result before I switch?

Five things, in this order.

1. The projected annual cost, not the rate. A sharp usage rate sitting on a high supply charge is not a cheap plan. Rates are not comparable across structures; annual costs are.
2. Whether your demand line was priced. If your bill carries a kW or kVA line and the comparison never mentions it, the comparison is incomplete rather than favourable.
3. The term and the exit cost. How long you are committed for, and what leaving early costs.
4. What happens at the end of the term. Rolling onto a default rate by inaction is one of the more expensive things that can happen to a business energy account.
5. Whether conditions are attached to the price. A rate that holds only while you pay on time is a different product from one that does not.

If your current plan wins, that is a real result. The list says so and you close the tab having lost a minute.

When is a broker genuinely the right call?

For some businesses, and pretending otherwise would be daft. Three cases, unchanged from what we say on the subject elsewhere.

Sites above the small customer threshold. Once a site's consumption passes the limit set in energy retail law it stops buying published plans and starts buying on negotiated contracts. There is no published price to compare, because the price does not exist until somebody quotes it, and getting it quoted well is real work.

Multi-site portfolios. Sites across several networks, possibly several states, are not one comparison problem. They are an aggregation problem, and the leverage comes from taking the whole portfolio to market at once.

Commercial and industrial scale. Where demand management, contracted capacity, embedded generation or hedging are genuinely on the table, the need is advice rather than a ranked list. That is a different service from this one.

Fix Your Bill is built for small customers on published plans, which is most businesses and not all of them. If you are in one of those three cases, a good broker or energy consultant is doing work worth paying for.

Does comparing it myself commit me to anything?

No. Reading a ranked list is not an application, and nothing about it puts you on a contract.

If you decide to move, you sign with the retailer directly rather than with us, which also means we are not a party to your contract. You are free to take the answer and sign up direct, and the arithmetic is yours either way.

Start with the bill you already have

Upload your business electricity bill and the engine reads the usage, the tariff, the rates and the demand line, prices the published plans available at your site against your own numbers, and ranks them by projected annual cost with the workings shown. Estimates, not quotes, and no callback.

The wider picture of what changes on a business bill is at business electricity plans.