Ask an energy consultant where their week goes and a familiar answer comes up. Not the analysis, not the client conversations, not the recommendations that clients actually pay for. It goes to collection: logging into utility portals, hunting for the right export, emailing clients for the bill they forgot to send, and copying numbers out of PDFs into a spreadsheet. It is necessary work, and it is quietly one of the biggest drains on a consulting practice.
This guide is about removing that drain. It walks through the manual collection problem as consultants and advisors actually experience it, then explains how authorized ongoing access and automated delivery change the economics of the work. The frame is Ontario, where EZGB collects data across more than fifty-five utilities.
The Manual Portal Login Problem
Every utility has a portal, and every portal is a little different. Different login pages, different navigation, different places to find the usage export, different file formats when you get there. For a consultant serving clients across several utilities, that means keeping track of many sets of credentials and relearning several interfaces every month.
The problem is not any single login. It is the repetition. A task that takes a few minutes per account becomes hours once you multiply it by every account, every client and every month. And because it is manual, it is fragile. A missed login means a gap in the data. A changed password means a support call. The whole exercise has to be repeated on every cycle, forever, just to stand still.
Chasing PDF Bills Across Clients
Then there are the bills. Usage feeds tell you how much energy was used, but the billed charges live on the invoices, and those often sit in a client's inbox rather than a portal. So the consultant sends the email nobody enjoys sending: could you forward last month's bills. Some clients reply quickly. Many do not. The follow-ups pile up, and the analysis waits on documents that trickle in one at a time.
When the bills finally arrive, they arrive as PDFs in dozens of different layouts, because every utility formats its bill differently. Someone then has to read each one and pull the charges into a usable form. It is slow, it is easy to get wrong, and it is exactly the kind of work that expensive expertise should not be spent on.
What This Costs a Practice
The cost of manual collection is not only time. It shows up in several ways that compound.
- Billable expertise spent on data entry instead of analysis and advice.
- Delays, because the work cannot start until the last client sends the last bill.
- Errors, because manual copying and varied formats invite mistakes that undermine trust in the results.
- A ceiling on growth, because taking on more clients means more collection, and collection does not scale with a bigger spreadsheet.
- Frustration, both for the team doing repetitive work and for clients who keep being asked for documents.
Authorized Ongoing Access With Connect My Data
The way out of the monthly scramble is to stop pulling data and start receiving it. Green Button's Connect My Data method is built for exactly this. Instead of logging in each time, the client authorizes their usage data to be shared with an authorized third party once, and from then on the data can be delivered automatically without repeated logins.
For a consultant, that single change reorders the whole workflow. Onboarding a client includes getting authorization, and after that the usage keeps arriving on its own. There is no portal to revisit, no credential to store, no monthly reminder to fetch the export. Ontario's regulation put Connect My Data in place across a large set of utilities, which is what makes this approach practical at the scale a consulting book requires.
The billed charges follow the same principle. Rather than chasing PDFs and reading them one by one, bills can be collected on a schedule and digitized automatically, so the charges arrive as structured data instead of as documents waiting to be transcribed.
Delivery by API or CSV
Automated access is only half the gain. The other half is receiving the data in a form your tools already accept, so there is no reformatting step. That is where delivery choices matter.
- CSV files for the spreadsheets and models most consulting work already runs on.
- A REST API for pulling data straight into a dashboard, a reporting tool or a custom workflow.
- SFTP for scheduled, hands-off drops into a shared location.
- Standardized formats across utilities, so a client on one utility looks the same as a client on another and comparisons are honest.
The point of standardized delivery is that the data lands ready to use. No cleaning pass, no reconciling one utility's layout against another's, no manual mapping before the analysis can begin.
The Hours Saved
Consider a modest practice serving a few dozen accounts across several utilities. In the manual model, each cycle means logging into portals, exporting usage, emailing clients for bills, waiting, and transcribing the PDFs that come back. Much of that recurs every single billing period.
In the automated model, authorization is set up once per client during onboarding, and after that both usage and billed charges arrive on their own in a consistent format. The recurring collection work largely disappears. What remains is the analysis, which is the part clients hired the consultant for in the first place. The hours that used to vanish into logins and follow-ups come back, and they come back every cycle, not once.
There is a growth effect too. When collection no longer scales with headcount, taking on more clients stops meaning more drudgery. The practice can grow its book without growing its data-entry burden in lockstep.
How EZGB Fits In
EZGB, the Easy Green Button Connector from Screaming Power, is built for this workflow. It collects consumption, usage and billing data through authorized utility connections and Green Button, digitizes the billed charges with BillScan, and retrieves everything on an ongoing automated basis so the monthly scramble stops repeating. It delivers the standardized result through JSON or CSV, a REST API, SFTP, or embeddable components, whichever matches how your practice already works.
For an Ontario consultant working across many utilities, the effect is a single dependable feed of clean data instead of a patchwork of logins and email chases. The collection problem becomes a solved input, and the calendar fills with advice rather than administration.
Get Started
If portal logins and PDF chasing are eating your week, EZGB is built to give that time back. Visit the EZGB site to see how authorized ongoing access and automated delivery work for a consulting practice, review the pricing and signup pages to find the fit for your book of clients, and book a walkthrough to see standardized usage and billed charges arriving on their own. Start collecting your clients' utility data automatically, and put your hours back into the work that clients actually pay for.
Sources
- Green Button Alliance, Green Button Connect My Data: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/green-button-connect-my-data-cmd
- Green Button, Connect My Data: https://www.greenbuttondata.org/cmd.html
- Green Button Alliance, Ontario Passes Regulation that Empowers Energy Users with Green Button Energy Data Access and Sharing: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/news/ontario-passes-regulation-that-empowers-energy-users-with-green-button-energy-data-access-and-sharing-
Source: greenbuttonalliance.org