Guides · 5 published · 4 categories

Guides

Working notes on getting structured data out of utility bills, and on the parts that go wrong quietly.

1 guide

Conversion

Getting bills out of PDF and into something you can work with.

How to Convert a Utility Bill PDF to Excel
Power Query, Acrobat, OCR, and AI extraction compared honestly, plus the spreadsheet layout that survives multi-meter bills and the checks that catch errors.
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2 guides

Understanding the data

What the fields on a utility bill actually mean.

1 guide

Validation

Telling the difference between data that is correct and data that looks correct.

AI Utility Bill Extraction Accuracy: How It Fails, and How to Catch It
AI reads utility bills well, which is exactly why its mistakes are hard to spot. The systematic failure modes, and the validation checks that catch each one.
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1 guide

Use cases

What the data gets used for once it is clean.

Getting Utility Bill Data Into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager
Portfolio Manager needs five fields per bill, not the whole bill. How to map utility accounts onto properties and meters, find gaps, and upload without errors.
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If it outgrew the spreadsheet

Have hundreds of bills every month?

At some point the manual version stops being worth it. MeterID collects, validates, and delivers utility bill data for multi-site portfolios, including the missing-bill detection and AP handoff that spreadsheets never quite manage.

See MeterID