Overview

Bayou Energy Bill upload provides companies with API access to data from automatically parsed customer utility bill PDF’s.

Now customer utility bill PDF’s can be uploaded via API or forwarded to a single email address where they will be automatically parsed and returned via API to the clean energy company’s application.

Context

Having a customer share their utility credentials can be challenging, especially when only a single bill is required or in enterprise sales where finding the correct person with access to those credentials can be difficult. As a workaround, end customers often share a PDF copy of their utility bill with their clean energy company. Previously, customer utility bill PDF’s received via email were then manually parsed by the company’s employees and uploaded to their database for use, distracting employees from their core business and sales process.

Using the feature

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Currently uploaded bills must be in PDF format, images of utility bills are not yet supported.

Uploading bills

Via API

Bills can be uploaded via API as outlined here.

Forwarding bills via email

Before forwarding bills via email, request access by emailing Bayou support. Bayou will respond letting you know when the feature has been enabled for your company.

After access has been granted, bills can be forwarded to a specific email address depending on the environment:

• Production environment: forward to [email protected]
• Staging environment: forward to [email protected]

For security reasons only someone with your company’s email domain can forward a bill to your account. As an example, for the fake company electriccitysolar.com, only email addresses with @electriccitysolar.com are able to forward utility bill PDF’s.

After upload behavior

Bills will be assigned to a customer. A unique customer is categorized by the pair of utility and customer utility account number. Bills from existing customers will be tied to those same customers while bills for new customers will automatically create new customers.

Uploaded bills have the value “email” or "API" for their source. Bills collected via the normal customer credential sharing form are marked as source “utility”

Accessing uploaded bills

Forwarded bills will be parsed and made available via API where they can be received with a GET request or via Webhook

Support

• For support, email [email protected]
• For questions or to discuss this feature in more detail, schedule time here.