Ask a property team where their energy data is and the honest answer is usually everywhere and nowhere. Some bills land in a shared inbox as PDFs. Some sit in a utility portal that one person has the login for. Tenant-metered accounts live entirely outside the landlord's view. When a reporting deadline or a cost review arrives, someone spends a week gathering statements, retyping numbers into a spreadsheet, and hoping nothing was missed. Across a whole portfolio, that manual scramble repeats every reporting cycle.
Collecting the data is the first half. What a portfolio does with it once it arrives, month after month, is described in benchmarking a building portfolio.
This guide is for owners and managers who need consumption and billing data across many buildings and many tenants, for ESG reporting and for cost tracking. It covers where the data lives, how authorized connections and bill digitization bring it together, and how to end up with one clean dataset instead of a pile of PDFs. The framing is Ontario-first, where authorized data access across utilities is a regulated norm.
Why Portfolio Data Is Fragmented
A single building can touch several utilities across electricity, natural gas, and water, each with its own account, portal, and bill format. Multiply that across a portfolio and a few structural problems appear:
- Many utilities and formats: every provider presents bills and data differently, so nothing lines up out of the box.
- Whole-building versus tenant metering: what the landlord is billed for and what tenants are billed for can be split, so no single account shows the full picture.
- Scattered access: logins, paper bills, and inboxes are spread across sites and people, with no central record.
- Timing mismatches: billing periods and read dates vary by utility, which makes clean month-over-month comparison hard.
- Manual entry: hand-keying figures introduces errors that are hard to catch and harder to trust in a report.
The result is that even a well-run portfolio often cannot answer basic questions quickly: what did we spend on energy last quarter, which buildings are trending up, and what is our consumption footprint across the whole book.
Two Ways to Get the Data
There are two complementary paths to pulling portfolio data together, and most portfolios need both.
Authorized Connections With Green Button
For accounts you hold or are authorized on, Green Button Connect My Data lets you authorize an ongoing feed of consumption and billing data directly from the utility, without re-exporting each cycle. For a one-time pull, a Download My Data export gives you a snapshot file from the utility portal. Both deliver data in a standard format, so buildings served by different utilities produce data that lines up.
Ontario makes this especially workable. Ontario Regulation 633/21, Energy Data, requires electricity and natural gas utilities to provide Green Button Connect My Data and Download My Data access built to the NAESB ESPI standard, a requirement in full effect since November 1, 2023, and the Green Button Alliance has certified utility platforms across the province, reported for 55 Ontario utilities as of November 2023. That certification applies to the utilities' own platforms, not to third-party tools. What it means for a portfolio owner is a consistent, standardized way to obtain authorized data across Ontario's utilities rather than a different process for each one.
PDF Bill Digitization
Authorized feeds cover accounts you can connect, but a real portfolio also has bills that arrive only as PDFs, tenant-related statements, historical bills that predate any connection, and utilities or account types where a live feed is not available. Bill digitization turns those PDF and paper bills into the same structured data as your connected feeds. That captures both the consumption figures and the billing details, charges, taxes, and read dates, that cost tracking depends on and that a usage feed alone may not include.
Combining the Two Into One Dataset
| Data source | What it covers best | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Connect My Data feed | Ongoing consumption for accounts you are authorized on | Live tracking and current reporting |
| Download My Data export | A point-in-time history snapshot | Baselines and one-off pulls |
| Bill digitization | Billing details and accounts without a feed | Cost tracking and filling gaps |
The aim is a single, consistent dataset across the portfolio, no matter how each building's data arrived. When consumption and billing records share the same structure, fields, and identifiers, you can roll them up by building, by region, or across the whole portfolio without stitching spreadsheets together by hand each time.
Putting the Dataset to Work
Once the data is unified, the reporting and analysis that used to take a week become routine.
- ESG and sustainability reporting: a consistent consumption record across buildings gives you the data foundation to report energy use and supports frameworks that ask for whole-portfolio figures.
- Cost tracking: standardized billing data makes it straightforward to see spend by building and spot bills that jump unexpectedly.
- Capital planning: reliable history helps you compare buildings and target efficiency projects where they will matter most.
- Benchmarking: with the whole portfolio in one shape, high and low performers are easy to identify.
A note on framing: this is about giving your team the data foundation for these efforts. Good data supports your reporting and decisions, and the quality of any report still depends on the choices your team makes with it.
What portfolio energy management needs from the data
Multi site energy management fails on plumbing far more often than on analysis. Before anyone can compare buildings, the dataset has to answer four questions without a person in the loop: which accounts belong to which building, which meter reads belong to which account, what period each read covers, and what unit it is in. Portfolios that skip this end up with a ranking table nobody trusts, because two of the buildings are missing a month and one is reported in cubic metres while the rest are in gigajoules.
- A stable building key: every account maps to one building, and that mapping survives a tenant change or a re-numbered account.
- Consistent period boundaries: billing periods and interval data line up to the same calendar, so a monthly comparison is really monthly.
- One unit per commodity: electricity in kWh, gas in cubic metres or gigajoules, converted once on the way in rather than in each report.
- Coverage you can prove: a per building, per month view of which accounts reported and which did not, so a gap shows up as a gap rather than as a saving.
- Both cost and consumption: cost alone hides a rate change, consumption alone hides a billing error.
Where a portfolio includes multi tenant buildings, some of that consumption sits behind submeters rather than utility meters, and it arrives from a different place with different quality. If that applies to you, read what submetering is and when a building needs it before you design the pipeline, because retrofitting submeter data into a portfolio dataset later is the harder path. You can also check which Ontario utilities we already collect from and what a connection costs on pricing.
Housing providers run the same problem with fewer staff. If your portfolio is non-profit, community or affordable housing, see utility data for non-profit and affordable housing.
Getting Delivery Right
Finally, the unified dataset has to reach the tools your team already uses. Delivery by REST API suits dashboards and BI tools that pull data on a schedule, CSV export suits analysts and spreadsheets, and SFTP suits bulk loads into a reporting system. The point is that once the data is standardized, you can send it wherever your ESG and finance workflows live without reshaping it each time.
Get Started
EZGB collects consumption and billing data across a portfolio through authorized Green Button connections and PDF bill digitization, standardizes it into one clean dataset, and delivers it by API, CSV, or SFTP for your ESG and cost tracking. If you manage many buildings and want to stop chasing PDFs and portal logins every reporting cycle, book a walkthrough or start a pilot from the pricing and signup pages at ezgb.ca, and we will help you bring your portfolio's data together.
Where buildings in the portfolio are submetered, what submetering is and when a building needs it explains how unit level readings relate to the distributor bill you are collecting here.
Sources
Bringing a large account list online for the first time is its own exercise, covered in onboarding utility accounts at scale, and the collection methods themselves are compared in how to collect utility data automatically.
- Ontario Regulation 633/21, Energy Data, CanLII: https://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/regu/o-reg-633-21/latest/o-reg-633-21.html
- Green Button Connect My Data (CMD), Green Button Alliance: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/green-button-connect-my-data-cmd
- Green Button Alliance announces 55 Ontario utilities' platforms certified: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/news/green-button-alliance-announces-55-ontario-based-utilities-platforms-are-now-green-button-certified
- Green Button Standard and NAESB ESPI technical information: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/technical-info
Source: canlii.org