A common moment of confusion in any energy data project sounds like this: the team connected a Green Button feed, the usage numbers are flowing, and then someone asks for the total dollar amount on last month's bill and it is not there. Nothing is broken. The two teams were simply talking about two different kinds of data. Green Button and bill digitization answer different questions, and knowing which one you need is the difference between a smooth project and weeks of confusion.
This guide draws the line clearly. It explains what Green Button provides, what PDF bill digitization provides, when each one is the right tool, and why a large number of teams end up needing both. It uses Ontario as the frame, because that is where EZGB operates across more than fifty-five utilities.
What Green Button Provides
Green Button is a standard for sharing energy usage data. Its whole purpose is to make a customer's meter data available in a consistent format, either downloaded manually or shared through an authorized connection. What it carries is consumption: how much electricity or gas was used, often broken into intervals such as hourly or daily, depending on what the meter records.
Green Button has two access methods. Download My Data is the manual route, where a customer signs into the utility website and downloads a standard usage file. Connect My Data is the authorized, ongoing route, where the customer permits their usage data to be shared with a third party so it can be delivered automatically over time. Both deliver usage. Neither is designed to be a full reproduction of the paper or PDF bill with every charge on it.
This is the key point. Green Button tells you how much energy moved. It is excellent for load profiles, energy modelling, measurement and verification, benchmarking and consumption trends. It is the right foundation whenever your question is about physical energy use.
What PDF Bill Digitization Provides
A utility bill is a financial document. It contains the actual charges: the commodity cost, delivery and distribution charges, fixed fees, adjustments, taxes and the final amount due. Those numbers live on the bill, and for many purposes they are exactly what you need. Bill digitization, which EZGB provides through BillScan, reads those documents and turns them into structured data you can work with.
Bill digitization matters because bills are where the money is, and because bills often carry detail that a usage feed does not. Rate components, account-level charges, billing periods as the utility defines them, and the totals a finance team will actually reconcile against all come from the bill. If your question is about cost, budgets, invoice accuracy or savings in dollars, the bill is the source of truth.
The catch is that bills are hard to read at scale. Every utility lays its bill out differently, names line items differently, and formats totals differently. A person can read one bill in a minute. Reading thousands of them, from dozens of utilities, month after month, is where the work becomes unmanageable by hand. That is the problem bill digitization solves.
Green Button vs Bill Digitization at a Glance
| Dimension | Green Button | PDF Bill Digitization (BillScan) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary data | Meter usage and interval consumption | Actual billed charges and totals |
| Answers the question | How much energy was used | What the energy cost |
| Granularity | Interval data such as hourly or daily, per meter | Per bill, over the utility's billing period |
| Source | Utility usage feed, manual or authorized | The customer's own bill documents |
| Access method | Download My Data or Connect My Data | Uploading or forwarding the bill files |
| Ongoing collection | Automatic with authorized Connect My Data | Automatic once bills arrive on a schedule |
| Best for | Load analysis, modelling, M and V, benchmarking | Cost analysis, budgeting, invoice validation, reporting |
| What it does not give you | The full billed charge breakdown | Fine-grained interval usage |
When You Need Connections and Green Button
Reach for authorized connections and Green Button when your work is grounded in how energy is used over time.
- You are building load profiles or shapes and need interval consumption.
- You are running energy modelling or simulations that depend on usage patterns.
- You are doing measurement and verification and need to compare usage before and after a change.
- You are benchmarking buildings against each other on a consumption basis.
- You want continuous, hands-off usage collection through an authorized connection rather than manual downloads.
When You Need Bill Digitization
Reach for bill digitization when your work is grounded in what was charged.
- You are tracking energy spend across a portfolio and need the actual dollar figures.
- You are validating invoices to catch billing errors or unexpected charges.
- You are building budgets and forecasts based on real cost history.
- You are reporting savings in financial terms that a finance team will accept.
- You need the rate components and line items that only appear on the bill.
Why Many Teams Need Both
The reason both come up so often is that most real questions have a usage side and a cost side. Consider a few examples. A savings report needs the usage change to prove the physical result and the billed charges to state the result in dollars. An efficiency project needs interval data to design the measure and bill data to show the payback. A portfolio review needs consumption to compare buildings fairly and cost to rank them by spend.
When usage and billing come from separate systems in separate formats, joining them becomes its own project. Periods do not line up, accounts are labelled differently, and reconciling the two eats the time you meant to spend on findings. The value of having both under one roof is not just convenience. It is that the two sides of the same account can be brought together cleanly, over the same periods, in a comparable form.
How EZGB Brings Both Together
EZGB, the Easy Green Button Connector from Screaming Power, collects both. It gathers meter usage through authorized utility connections and Green Button, and it captures the billed charges through BillScan bill digitization. It supports automated ongoing retrieval so both keep arriving without manual effort, and it delivers the standardized result through JSON or CSV, a REST API, SFTP, or embeddable components inside your own product.
The result is that you no longer have to choose between knowing how much energy was used and knowing what it cost. For an Ontario portfolio spread across many utilities, both sides arrive in one consistent shape, ready to analyze rather than ready to clean up.
Get Started
If you have been stitching usage feeds and bills together by hand, EZGB is built to end that. Visit the EZGB site to see how Green Button access and BillScan bill digitization work side by side, review the pricing and signup pages to choose the fit for your team, and book a walkthrough to see both usage and billed charges arriving in one clean stream. Start collecting the utility data your work actually needs, without deciding which half to give up.
Sources
- Green Button, Connect My Data: https://www.greenbuttondata.org/cmd.html
- Green Button Alliance, Green Button Standard: https://www.greenbuttonalliance.org/green-button
- 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: greenbuttondata.org