Planning for the upcoming year’s capital expenditures (capex) is a vital piece of the budgeting puzzle that every business owner or board of directors needs to allocate time for and review closely.
Done right, it can take the stress out of budgeting for the business by laying out all expected major expenses, timing them effectively, and ensuring they’re affordable and accomplish real business goals.
Done poorly, however, it can lead to unrealistic strategies, unfinished projects, and serious impacts on the bottom line. If your organization owns and operates a commercial building in the Charlotte area, your commercial HVAC company can be a big help in improving your annual capex planning. Here’s how:
Performing an audit of existing equipment
By taking the time to professionally audit existing HVAC equipment in your commercial building, skilled HVAC technicians can obtain a baseline understanding of the system’s current status as far as age, maintenance, life expectancy, and energy efficiency.
Learn more about creating an energy efficiency plan for your building.
Working with your in-house maintenance team or existing building automation equipment, they can also review historical usage patterns and extrapolate expected usage for the upcoming year.
This audit of building systems and review of their performance provides the information necessary to assist with capex planning for in the following ways:
Setting up a planned maintenance program
Based on the results of the audit described above, commercial HVAC technicians and energy engineers will be in an excellent position to determine the likely maintenance needs for each component in your system. The recommended maintenance schedule they provide can serve as a planning tool when mapping out capital expenditures for the upcoming year.
In many cases, following a planned maintenance program can lessen (or eliminate) the possibility of facing expensive emergency repairs or replacements which can put a serious dent in an otherwise healthy capex plan for the year.
Improving building energy efficiency and optimizing expense
Another way your commercial HVAC partner can assist with accurate capex planning is by recommending the best combination of equipment, control settings and usage patterns to optimize building energy efficiency and keep operation expenses under control.
This frees up more room in the budget for investments in other areas, effectively making your business more profitable.
While planning annual capital expenditures is a potentially complex task, and the input of your commercial HVAC company is just one component of the full strategy, it’s important to get all the professional help you can when working to optimize the financial health of your business. Let AirTight FaciliTech help this year by performing an equipment audit, recommending an ongoing maintenance schedule, and discovering opportunities for optimizing the energy efficiency of your Charlotte commercial HVAC systems.
