Hierarchical Levels, Metering and Attributes There are four possible hierarchical levels for the information contained within the application. In descending order these are: Organisation, Site, Facility and Entity. The four levels have been chosen to enable reporting breakdowns which can correspond to either separate usages or department/cost centre units. In addition, there are Meters which may have measurement coverage within one or more of these divisions. Each Organisation can operate a number of Sites. A Site can comprise a number of Facilities, Entities and/or Meter(s). For example a University campus would probably be a Site, and within this site would be a number of individual Facilities (possibly buildings), which are in turn broken down into one or more Entities. The accompanying metering may measure energy for just the whole Site, or possibly for some or all of the Facilities and Entities which make up the Site. The Meter is the level at which energy consumption can be most accurately quantified. This, however, may need to be further assessed to estimate the proportion of energy used by individual Facilities and Entities when they are not separately metered. If such an assessment cannot be done with any reliability, then the area covered by the Meter may have to be kept without any further sub-division but that would compromise the value you can get from reports. When each Entity level has been identified it is necessary to gather the information on its Attributes. These are essentially how much it is used, its size, its shape, its environment and details of all the relevant materials used in its construction. This is the key information required for measuring energy efficiency and then the benchmarking. The specific Attributes required for each Entity vary according to its Purpose which is itself chosen by matching predominant usage to those on a provided list. The application also allows a sequence of separate Records to be created for each Entity so that any effects due to either actual or planned changes in Attributes can be monitored and costed. You may well have a number of different energy sources and utilities such as electricity, reticulated gas, water, bottled gas, diesel, and coal. Consumption for each of these utilities needs to be separately identified under the appropriate Meters. The consumption information can be entered by various date periods and time periods so that sources can be used ranging from half hourly data logger figures, through monthly profile information, to aggregated totals for any period such as a year. Clearly, as mentioned above, the more detailed the consumption information, the more useful and accurate the outputs will be.