One of CFEX’s enterprise customers is an early adopter of renewable energy, having signed more than 12 virtual PPA contracts over the past decade. Those PPA contracts all have complex financial terms and are therefore extremely challenging to reconcile invoices from the renewable IPPs before making payments. Previously, the staff spent days manually verifying the amounts billed by IPPs. Due to the complexities of these PPA contracts, its staff can only empirically verify the billed amount to ensure the invoices are in the “right ballpark”. Such manual verification was a major concern of its finance and accounting team.

To address these challenges, Target engaged CFEX to provide PPA contract management, settlement, and forecasting capabilities to bring energy costs under control and free up time for its renewable procurement operations and accounting staff. CFEX’s Renewable Asset Operation Platform completely transforms the business processes for renewable operations and accounting, replacing manual processes with automated, light-out operations. CFEX imports emails from IPPs, parses invoices and generation meter data, calculates daily accrual, and reconciles monthly invoices, all in the background automatically. The renewable procurement team receives email notifications only when discrepancies for invoice reconciliation exceed $300.

As part of the project setup process, CFEX’s service team reviews, models, configures, and validates all financial terms of the enterprise customer’s PPA contracts using its Contract Management System.

These contract models are then applied to revenue meter data retrieved from the wholesale markets where the renewable generation assets are located to recalculate the invoices from scratch. The financials are calculated for each interval and aggregated into the line items that match the IPP invoices. The figure below shows sample settlement results of one of the PPA contracts for the first 10 months of 2025. The IPP invoiced amounts are listed under the “Total Charge” column, while the invoice amounts calculated by CFEX are listed under “Verification”. The discrepancies between IPP invoiced amounts and CFEX calculated amounts are listed under “Reconciliation”. The results show significant discrepancies in three of the ten invoices for this PPA contract, while the remaining months match perfectly. For these discrepancies, CFEX generates interval-level reconciliation results that pinpoint errors occurring in specific steps of the calculation for specific intervals. The interval reconciliation results are used by the company’s staff to share with the IPP for dispute resolution.

In addition to accurately and automatically settling PPA contracts and reconciling invoices, CFEX’s Renewable Asset Operation Platform also forecasts pro forma energy costs for each PPA contract. CFEX forecasts generation using fuel-type-specific forecasting models that incorporate weather data and are trained on historical generation data to improve accuracy. CFEX forecasts wholesale prices using its proprietary models, which are also trained on historical prices, to improve forecast accuracy and are revised in response to changes in market conditions. The forecast energy costs are used to set the budgets. The reconciled monthly invoices are compared with the forecasts to generate variance analyses.

• The finance and accounting team can rest assured that it has the most stringent financial controls over energy costs across all PPA contracts by leveraging CFEX’s PPA settlement capability. CFEX’s system automatically reconciles every invoice with penny-level accuracy, identifying overbilling in the background during light-out operations and alerting staff only when discrepancies reach $300.
• The finance and accounting team has better intra-month visibility into the financial position of each PPA contract, leveraging CFEX’s daily settlement and accrual capability to avoid month-end surprises, as it did previously.
• The finance and accounting team can close the books immediately at month-end using daily accrual, without waiting for invoices to arrive.
• The renewable energy procurement team has a better understanding of the factors driving the energy cost variances through variance analyses.