# How to use the Utility Bill Parsing tool in your Wattics dashboard

This articles describes how to set up utility bill templates and input your utility bill data in the Wattics dashboard for analysis.
Written by Amy Ryan
Updated over a week ago

The utility bill feature (not to be confused with the utility bill report) is a tool to make it easier for partners to manage data from different utility bills having a place to store their scanned files and templates to help localizing data inside bills.

### Where to find it in the dashboard and how to use it?

There have two distinct areas:

- Part 1 - Utility Bill Templates: In this area, you will be able to create your own bill templates to be used in the Bill parsing section. This area can be used by Wattics administrator users only.

- Part 2 - Utility Bill Parsing: Here, the actual bills will be uploaded and have their data stored as Wattics data points using a template as a reference.

### Part 1: Utility Bill Templates

To access this area, click on the Admin tab in the Wattics dashboard and then on the utility bill tool icon.

The first thing you will see is a list of existing templates:

(You don't see any templates, none have been set up by the administrator users associated with your Wattics account)

In the second column of the templates section, there are 3 buttons for preview, editing and removal of existing templates. To create a new one, click on the right top tab Add new supplier bill template. You will see the following page where you can upload a Bill to be used as a reference for this template and give it a name.

After you have uploaded a bill file, given the new template a name and clicked on Send, a new page with the bill will appear for the template creation:

On the left side, the user will see their pdf bill and, on the right side, the form to add information related to the bill. You must drag and drop the buttons on the right to point the place the info related to the button on the bill template - namely:

- "Add a pointer to the unique site/meter account"

- "Add a pointer to the date on the pdf"

- "Add a pointer to the unique meter reference ID"

The user will be able to add any number of new data points they can extract from the bill. The legend at the bottom will show them how it will look in the Breakdown menu tree, for example:

Once all information is filled, the user can click on “Save template”. Having at least one template, it is time to parse actual bills.

### Part 2: Utility Bill Parsing

To access this feature, you must go to the Dashboard tab and click on the Utility Bill Parsing button on the right menu. The user will see the initial Bill listing page.

To start parsing you must upload your in the section "drop your bills here". As soon as the bills have been successfully uploaded, the bills will appear in a list: See below:

To parse a bill, the user must select the Site where the template’s data points should be placed and which template to use for the desired bill. Once both selected, the parse button will turn green indicating the possibility to start the parsing.

Once the parse button is clicked, the parsing process will start. If the selected site is empty or doesn’t contain one data point with the same name matching the template, a pop-up window will appear offering the user to create the desired data points:

If all the data points already existed in the selected Site, you will see the following:

Here you will be able to check the bill values and fill the parsing information. For each data point, you will be able to add values and/or costs. If in doubt about where to find the information inside the bill file, you can click on the magnification icon on the top right of the screen to visualize a template preview with a legend:

Once finished filling the data, the user can click on "Add items data". After this process the data will be available in the respective data points in the Breakdown:

What are the main benefits?

The Utility Bill management tool allows the user to organize and manage multiple digitized bills and also provide an interface to read their values and add them to their Wattics dashboard.

For further support and clarifications, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team:

Wattics Support

If you are not currently subscribed to the Wattics platform and want to schedule a demo of this tool, please, request a demo below:

Request for Demo

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