Getting Utility Bill Data Into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager

For each meter entry, Portfolio Manager requires a start date, end date, and usage quantity. Cost and an estimation flag are optional; electric meters can also track demand and demand cost. The meter record supplies the resource type and unit. Rate class, prior balance, and late fees are not part of a standard meter entry.

The difficult step is mapping bills, which are organized by account, to Portfolio Manager properties and meters. Missing periods or an incorrect mapping can prevent metrics from calculating. Only eligible property types receive a 1–100 ENERGY STAR score.

What Portfolio Manager stores

Portfolio Manager organizes the data at three levels:

A Portfolio Manager meter can represent one physical meter or an aggregate consumption stream. EPA’s glossary gives the example of one aggregate electricity meter covering 100 tenant meters in an apartment building. Use an aggregate only when the source data is intentionally combined.

Meters carry up to three optional custom identifiers. Use them for values such as the utility account, physical meter, or service-point ID. EPA documents the limit in its Portfolio Manager data worksheet. The identifier guide explains why those numbers should remain separate.

Why the account-to-meter mapping is the hard part

A billing account and a Portfolio Manager meter describe different things. One account may map to one meter, several meters at one property, or services at several properties.

The failure modes are consistent across utilities:

• One consolidated invoice can cover several service addresses. Georgia Power’s Summary Billing is available to qualifying commercial and industrial customers with ten or more eligible accounts, and National Grid Massachusetts offers summary billing for qualified customers with multiple electric accounts.
• One property has several accounts for different parts of the building: house/common meter, parking deck, a separate chiller service.
• In deregulated gas markets the invoice comes from a marketer while the meter belongs to the local distribution company. In Georgia, a Gas South bill carries both a Gas South account number and a separate Atlanta Gas Light (AGL) Number, and a Constellation invoice shows a Meter Number alongside the Atlanta Gas Light charges it passes through. Work out which of those identifies the building before you map anything.
• A single Con Edison location can involve several meters across several accounts, with different services falling under different service classifications, so a mixed-use building can end up with multiple electric accounts that all belong to one property.

Maintain a mapping table from utility, account, service address, and meter or service ID to the Portfolio Manager property and meter IDs. Include effective dates so account and meter changes do not rewrite history.

Who ends up doing this

State and local benchmarking rules are one common reason to use Portfolio Manager. Coverage thresholds, property types, and deadlines differ by jurisdiction. EPA advises owners to check the applicable local rule and links to current policy resources from its reporting and disclosure page.

Owners also use the platform to track energy, water, cost, and emissions metrics for internal reporting or external requests.

Three ways to get data in, and when each is worth it

Manual entry. Add a meter from the property’s Energy or Water tab, then add entries for each bill. This is reasonable for a small portfolio and useful when learning the data model.

Spreadsheet upload. Two flavors. For a meter without optional demand tracking, the single-meter template downloads from the Manage Bills page with these five basic columns:

Start Date (Required) | End Date (Required) | Usage (Required) | Cost (Optional) | Estimation (Optional)

Estimation takes Yes or No. An electric meter configured to track demand can also include Demand and Demand Cost. There is no unit column and no meter column: the unit comes from the meter record, and the meter is implied by the page that generated the template. A wrong unit must be fixed on the meter record, not in this spreadsheet.

The multi-meter route is the “complex spreadsheet” under Manage Portfolio. You pick a task (Add Meters to Existing Properties, or Add Bills to Existing Meters), select the properties, and Portfolio Manager generates a custom template pre-populated with your own property and meter IDs. The template is generated for that account and task, so it is not a reusable offline file. Generate a new one after the meter list changes.

EPA’s utility-data upload guide says not to change template formatting or column headers. Complete the required fields and paste calculated results as values before upload.

Web services. A utility or approved service provider can exchange data with an authorized account. If a provider already supports your utility, this avoids manual uploads. Building a new integration requires development and approval, so it is a separate project rather than a quick upload method.

Getting from PDFs to rows

You need a small subset of what’s on the page: service period start and end, usage, unit, cost, and whichever identifier maps the bill to your meter. See what fields to extract from a utility bill for the full set and the variant names, and converting a utility bill PDF to Excel for the mechanics.

The period label is where this goes wrong. The same concept may appear as “Service Period,” “Billing Period,” “Read Dates,” or a bare “From/To” pair. Portfolio Manager defines the fields as the first and last days of the billing cycle. Use the bill’s service or billing period. Do not substitute statement date, due date, or a read date that falls outside that period.

An accounts payable export is usually not enough. AP data is commonly keyed to invoice date and amount payable, not service period and commodity usage, and one invoice line may combine several services with prior balances or fees.

Finding gaps before you upload

Portfolio Manager metrics use 12 full calendar months of data. A full month includes its first and last day. EPA notes that mid-month billing cycles may require 13 bills to cover that span. The Portfolio Manager glossary also documents exceptions for meters activated or deactivated during the period and for delivered fuels.

The glossary defines a gap as an uncovered date and an overlap as a date covered by more than one entry. EPA’s upload guide says gaps or overlaps greater than one day can trigger an error alert. Find all of them before upload, then resolve them against the source bills.

Find them in the spreadsheet first. Sort by meter, then start date, and compare two numbers per meter:

Span     = MAX(End Date) - MIN(Start Date) + 1
Covered  = SUMPRODUCT((End Date - Start Date) + 1)

Covered = Span   contiguous
Covered < Span   gap
Covered > Span   overlap

To locate the specific break, put this beside row 3 of a sorted block and fill down:

=IF(A3<>B2+1, "gap/overlap at " & TEXT(B2+1,"mm/dd/yyyy"), "")

Pick one boundary convention and apply it to the whole meter: next start date equals prior end date plus one day. Bills are inconsistent about whether the read date belongs to the closing period or the opening one, and mixing conventions inside one meter is how you generate 12 one-day overlaps.

Two other alerts matter. An energy entry longer than 65 days prevents weather-normalized metrics, and “No meters selected for metrics” means the meters have not been included in property calculations. Both are documented in the Portfolio Manager glossary.

Problems that surface at upload

Unit mismatches may still produce valid-looking values. If the bill reads 1,842 Ccf but the Portfolio Manager meter is set to therms, entering 1,842 records the wrong unit. Portfolio Manager supports Ccf directly and converts native billing units into a common energy unit. Set the meter to the unit printed on the bill; EPA’s thermal conversion reference lists the factors.

Estimated reads followed by true-ups need a decision, not a default. Set the Estimation flag when you enter an estimate, then replace the value once the actual read arrives. If you instead leave the estimate and add the true-up as its own entry, you’ve either double-counted or created an overlap, depending on the dates you gave it.

Meters entered at the wrong level are harder to unwind. A submeter serving one tenant, entered as a property-level meter alongside the whole-building meter, double-counts that load and pushes energy use intensity (EUI) up. Aggregate meters are the intended tool: one Portfolio Manager meter standing for many physical meters, with the individual meters optionally documented underneath.

Multi-tenant and common areas

If tenants are directly metered and you receive only common-area bills, you do not have whole-building data. Portfolio Manager asks which parts of the property the selected meters cover. Request aggregated whole-building data where the utility offers it, collect tenant data with the required authorization, or record the limited coverage accurately. EPA maintains a utility data access map because availability varies by territory.

Illustrative worked example

The account numbers, addresses, meter IDs, usage, and costs below are fictional. The arithmetic is exact.

One Georgia Power invoice, two properties, three meters. That’s the mapping problem in three rows.

Meter entries for Midtown Office, Electric – House:

379,380 kWh and $44,222.30 across the three periods, a blended $0.1166/kWh, and Span equals Covered at 91 days. Contiguous.

Midtown Office also has 13 electric bills running from 12/15/2024 through 01/13/2026, which covers calendar year 2025. Its gas meter is missing August. The property does not have a complete 12-month energy record for all active energy meters, so calendar-year metrics may be unavailable. Check coverage per meter before upload.