How it works
From a pile of bills to a filed report, with a person checking each step
BrickFlow is built around one idea: every number you report should be traceable to a bill, a utility feed or a file, and someone should have looked at it on the way through.
Step 1
Add your buildings and data
Set up each building once: address, floor area, property type and the meters that serve it. Then add data in whichever form you have it.
- Utility bills
- Upload PDFs or images. AI reads the consumption, billing period, charges and account number, with a confidence score on every field. Bills below the confidence threshold are flagged, and you confirm or correct each one before it is saved. The original file is kept alongside the extracted values.
- Green Button
- Electricity and natural gas data through Ontario’s Green Button standard. Download My Data files can be uploaded today. Connect My Data lets you authorize your utility to send data directly; it becomes available for each utility as that utility completes its registration of BrickFlow as a third party.
- CSV and Excel
- Existing consumption workbooks and meter lists can be imported, so the history you already have is not lost.
Step 2
Check it
Data arrives from several places. BrickFlow keeps the source of every reading and tells you when something looks wrong.
- Anomaly alerts
- Month-to-month spikes and drops against the building’s own baseline are flagged, with the sensitivity you choose. You can acknowledge an alert, record the cause, and see which source the reading came from.
- Discrepancies between sources
- When Portfolio Manager and your own records disagree, for example on gross floor area, the difference waits in a queue for you to decide. The value already on record stays live until you choose.
- Possible duplicate buildings
- Two records at the same address are flagged so you can count them as one building or keep them apart. Nothing is merged automatically.
Step 3
Sync and report
Ontario’s EWRB program and the City of Toronto both collect data through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. Keep it in sync and both are covered.
- Portfolio Manager sync
- Connect your Portfolio Manager account to BrickFlow as a service provider. Properties and meters sync both ways, on a schedule or when you trigger it, with a log of every run. Scores and computed metrics from Portfolio Manager appear next to the building.
- Dashboards
- Consumption, cost, energy use intensity, emissions and anomalies across the portfolio, with building-level comparison.
- Exports
- Energy and emissions reports in CSV, Excel, XML and PDF, a GRESB spreadsheet in GRESB’s own field layout, and the EWRB figures in the portfolio summary. A calendar of reporting deadlines with reminders is included.
What the pilot does not do yet
So that you can plan around it:
- Benchmarking compares buildings within your own portfolio. There is no external peer group or percentile ranking yet.
- Green Button Connect My Data depends on each utility approving BrickFlow as a registered third party. Until a utility does, its data comes in as Download My Data files.
- Anomaly checks are rule-based. They do not yet adjust for weather.
- There is no self-serve delete button; data is deleted on request, with you, by BrickFlow staff.