If you benchmark buildings in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, the tool itself is the easy part. The hard part is feeding it. Portfolio Manager scores a property from its meters, and it wants a complete, gap free monthly history for each one. For a single building you can type bills in by hand. Across a portfolio of dozens or hundreds of accounts, spread over electricity, gas and water, the monthly re keying is what actually eats the week, and it is where entries fall behind, gaps creep in, and scores stop reflecting reality.
If you would rather stop hand keying bills, EZGB collects your consumption and billing data and delivers it clean, ready to load into Portfolio Manager. Start a pilot or book a walkthrough at ezgb.ca, and we will help you map your accounts to the right meters.
What Portfolio Manager actually needs from you
Before any metric or ENERGY STAR score appears, Portfolio Manager expects a specific base of property and energy data. According to the EPA data collection worksheet, benchmarking a property requires basic property details plus 12 consecutive months of energy data for the meters that serve it.
- Property attributes: name, address, gross floor area, year built and use details, so the tool knows what it is comparing against.
- A meter for every energy source: separate meters for electricity, natural gas, district steam, water and anything else that serves the building.
- Monthly consumption per meter: the quantity used in each billing period, in the meter's units, with real start and end dates.
- Cost per period where you track it: energy cost is optional for the score, but it is what turns Portfolio Manager into a spend and budget view, not just an energy one.
- A continuous timeline: bills that together cover every day of the reporting year, with no missing periods and no overlaps.
None of this is exotic. It is exactly the information printed on the utility bills you already receive. The problem is not that the data does not exist. It is that getting it out of PDFs and portals, standardized, and into the right meter every month is slow manual work.
The manual entry problem at portfolio scale
One property has maybe two or three meters. A portfolio of 100 buildings can easily carry several hundred meters once you count electricity, gas and water separately, and multi tenant sites multiply that again. Every one of those meters needs a fresh reading every month, forever. That is the treadmill.
Doing it by hand means someone logs into each utility portal or opens each PDF bill, finds the consumption and the period dates, and types them into the matching meter in Portfolio Manager. Miss a login, misread a decimal, or paste a value into the wrong meter, and the error sits quietly in your benchmarking until an audit or a disclosure deadline surfaces it. At portfolio scale the failure mode is rarely a dramatic mistake. It is drift: a handful of meters that are two or three months behind, a few that got estimated instead of actual, and a score that slowly stops being trustworthy.
Estimated reads and data gaps quietly break your metrics
Portfolio Manager is strict about coverage for a reason. Its own Data Quality Checker exists to catch gaps and overlaps in your meter data, because a single uncovered date in the calendar year can mean energy is missing from the metrics. Two failure patterns are common:
- Gaps: a billing period was never entered, so a stretch of days has no consumption behind it and the annual total is understated.
- Estimated reads standing in for actual: utilities sometimes issue estimated bills when a meter is not read. If those estimates flow into Portfolio Manager and are never trued up against the real read, the building's usage profile is built on approximations.
Both problems are fixable, but only if someone notices. The reliable fix is upstream: pull complete, actual consumption for every meter, every period, in a standard shape, so gaps never open and estimates get replaced by real reads as they arrive.
That upstream feed is the whole idea behind EZGB. Tell us your accounts once, and we keep the underlying consumption and billing data current so your Portfolio Manager entries stay complete. See how it fits your setup at ezgb.ca, and we will size the right feed for your account count.
Where a clean, standardized feed changes the work
EZGB (Easy Green Button Connector) gathers your utility consumption and billing data from three sources, normalizes electricity, gas and water into one consistent structure, and hands it back ready to load. The point is that whichever source a given account uses, the output looks the same, so your Portfolio Manager import does not have to care where it came from.
Authorized utility connections
For accounts where we can connect directly, EZGB pulls consumption and billing data straight from the utility with the customer's authorization, across 50 or more utilities, with up to two years of history where it is available. That backfill is useful precisely because Portfolio Manager wants a full trailing year to compute metrics, so you can populate history rather than waiting a year for it to accrue.
Green Button (Download My Data and Connect My Data)
Green Button is a standardized way for a customer to export or share their own energy data. It is built on the NAESB Energy Services Provider Interface (ESPI) standard, which means a Green Button file from one certified utility carries the same structure as one from another. EZGB ingests both Download My Data files and ongoing Connect My Data authorizations, so a customer sharing their data once can keep the feed flowing.
PDF and scanned bills (BillScan)
Plenty of accounts are not on a portal at all. For those, BillScan digitizes PDF and scanned paper bills, reading the consumption, the period dates and the charges off the document and turning them into the same standardized records as the other two sources. This is what closes the last gap in a portfolio, because it means the awkward accounts that usually get skipped are the ones that finally stay current.
The three ways EPA supports
EPA documents exactly three ways to get data into Portfolio Manager, whether you are setting up properties for the first time or updating existing ones. Knowing which one you are committing to matters, because the effort curve is completely different once you pass a handful of meters.
| Method | What it involves | Where it stops working |
|---|---|---|
| Manual entry | Create or update one meter at a time in the web interface | Fine for a few meters. Becomes the monthly chore at portfolio scale |
| Spreadsheet upload | Create or update multiple meters at once with EPA templates | Workable, but someone still assembles the spreadsheet from bills and portals every cycle |
| Web services | A third party exchanges data directly with Portfolio Manager through the API | Requires a provider with the connection already built and your accounts already collected |
Most teams start with manual entry, move to spreadsheets when the meter count grows, and look at web services when the spreadsheet itself becomes the bottleneck. The work that does not disappear in the first two options is the collection: logging into portals, opening PDF bills, and transcribing figures before anything gets uploaded.
What web services actually involve
EPA offers a REST based API for exchanging data with Portfolio Manager. It runs in both directions: a provider can import property, energy, water and waste data into a customer's account, and can export metrics such as the ENERGY STAR score back out into the provider's own software.
Providers develop against a test environment first, then register the Portfolio Manager account for live exchange through the Software Development tab under Account Settings. EPA reviews products against its Web Service Provider Guidelines, and approved products may display the Works with Portfolio Manager badge. EPA also publishes a list of organizations that exchange data this way, which is worth checking when you evaluate any vendor's claim.
The important detail for a building owner is that web services move data between systems. They do not collect it from your utilities. Something still has to gather consumption and billing history from every account first, which is the part that takes the time.
Delivery that fits how you already load data
Clean data only helps if it lands where your process expects it. EZGB delivers three ways, so you can match whatever your Portfolio Manager workflow already uses:
| Delivery | Best for | How it lands |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | Automated pipelines and custom uploads | Your system pulls standardized meter data on a schedule and pushes it into Portfolio Manager, including its own web services exchange. |
| CSV | Spreadsheet driven teams and bulk upload | Consistent columns you can map once and reuse for every monthly load. |
| SFTP | Hands off recurring drops | Standardized files delivered to a folder on a schedule with no manual export step. |
Portfolio Manager also supports automated data exchange with utilities and data providers through its own web services, so once the underlying data is clean and standardized, keeping entries current stops being a monthly typing job and becomes a scheduled transfer.
A Canada first note on Green Button
If your portfolio includes Ontario, the data sharing side is already regulated in your favor. Under Ontario Regulation 633/21, electricity and natural gas utilities across the province were required to implement Green Button Download My Data and Connect My Data, and the Green Button Alliance has certified 55 Ontario utility platforms against the NAESB ESPI version 3.3 standard by the November 1, 2023 deadline. In practice that means a large share of Ontario accounts can share standardized data directly, and EZGB can fill the rest with connections or BillScan so your entire benchmarking set stays complete.
If Portfolio Manager upkeep is the chore that never ends for your team, that is the exact problem EZGB is built to remove. Book a walkthrough or start a pilot at ezgb.ca, and we will get a clean monthly feed flowing into your properties.
Sources
If your portfolio is in Canada, the benchmarking requirements and the whole building data rules differ from the United States. Those are covered separately in the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager Canada guide, which goes through NRCan's guidance, tenant aggregation and the Ontario reporting rules. This article stays on the data feed itself.
- ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager: What data is required to benchmark your property
- ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager 201: use the Data Quality Checker
- Utilities providing energy data using Portfolio Manager web services
- Green Button Alliance: 55 Ontario utility platforms Green Button certified
- Green Button Alliance: Ontario energy data regulation requires utilities to implement Green Button
Source: portfoliomanager.energystar.gov