Portfolio Manager rewards setup and punishes improvising. Set up a multi-site account once, with the rules written down, and every reporting cycle after it is a repeat. Improvise, and each cycle starts with a cleanup.

You will not be the first to use it. ENERGY STAR says nearly 25% of U.S. commercial building space is already actively benchmarking in Portfolio Manager (ENERGY STAR, Benchmark your building).

This note covers setup for a portfolio of many buildings. If you report to the City of Denver or the Colorado Energy Office, confirm their current rules on what to enter and when. The steps here organize the data; they do not decide whether a building meets any program’s requirements.

Decide who owns the account

The account should belong to the building owner, under a shared company mailbox. Not one employee’s address, and not a consultant’s. Consultants, property managers and verifiers get shared access to the properties they work on.

That way, when a contract ends or a person leaves, the history stays with the buildings. Rebuilding five years of meter data because the only login walked out the door is an avoidable cost.

Record in writing:

  • the account holder and the mailbox behind it
  • who has access to which properties, and at what level
  • the date each access was granted, and why
  • who removes access when the work ends

One property per building

Each building gets its own property record. Do not combine buildings to save time, and do not split one building into suites.

Where buildings connect, share a campus or share meters, check how the program you report to wants them set up before creating the records. Restructuring a property after three years of data is slow work.

For each property, record:

  • the street address, exactly as the city or state has it
  • gross floor area and its source document
  • each use type and its floor area, for mixed-use buildings
  • the year built, and any major change since
  • any identifier a city or state has assigned

A naming convention you can sort

At 60 buildings, names decide whether the account is usable. Pick one pattern and apply it everywhere:

Field Convention Why
Property name Site code, then city: “RT-014 Aurora” Sorts by code, reads at a glance
Meter name Utility, fuel, last digits: “XE Elec 4471” Matches the bill without opening it
Your site code Stored with the property Joins Portfolio Manager to your own records

Match the names in Portfolio Manager to the names in accounts payable and in your bill tracking. One building, one name, everywhere it appears.

Map meters before entering them

Every utility meter serving a building becomes a meter in Portfolio Manager, assigned to that property. That only works if you know which meter serves which building.

In a multi-site portfolio, that map tends to be wrong somewhere. A meter moved with a tenant, a gas meter is shared by two buildings, or an account is still named for a store that closed. Map meters to sites before entering anything.

A Peg Baseline builds that map in writing, with 24 months of bills behind it. The same map serves benchmarking, bill auditing and budgeting, so it only has to be built once.

For tenant-paid meters, ask your utility how it provides whole-building data to owners. Some utilities can send aggregated data straight to Portfolio Manager; others send files. Ask early, because the request can take weeks.

Getting data in

There are three ways to load usage, and many portfolios use more than one:

  1. Manual entry. Workable for a handful of buildings, slow and easy to mistype beyond that.
  2. Spreadsheet upload. Bulk uploads from a template, useful for many meters at once.
  3. Utility data exchange. Where your utility offers it, data reaches the account on a schedule.

Whichever you use, keep the bills or source files. Portfolio Manager stores the numbers it is given. It does not check them against the bills.

With spreadsheet uploads, test one building before loading 60. Check its annual totals against the bills by hand, fix the template, then load the rest. One wrong column mapping repeated across a portfolio takes far longer to undo.

Checks before every report

Run these on each property before a report goes anywhere:

  • every meter has 12 full months, with no gaps and no overlaps
  • estimated reads are flagged, and replaced where actual reads exist
  • units match the bill: kWh, therms, or whatever the utility billed in
  • floor area matches the property record and your own list
  • energy use intensity sits within a range you can explain against last year

Our glossary defines energy use intensity, interval data, estimated reads and the other terms you will meet in the tool.

Portfolio Manager also shows weather-normalized figures alongside actual use. Those help when comparing years, but each reporting program decides which figures it uses. Our note on weather-normalizing energy use explains what the adjustment does.

When sites open, close or sell

A multi-site account is never finished. Sites open, close and change hands every year, and each change has a right way to record it.

  • Opening. Create the property when occupancy begins, and start each meter on its first read date, not the lease date.
  • Closing. Do not delete the property. Record the last read date on each meter, so the history stays intact.
  • Selling. Agree with the buyer how the property and its data pass to them, and keep your own export before the handover.
  • Changing use. A store that becomes an office needs its use type and floor areas updated, with the date of the change.

Deleting a closed site feels tidy and destroys the record someone will ask for later. Old data costs nothing to keep.

Review access once a year

Shared access piles up. A verifier from two cycles ago, a property manager for a building you sold, a consultant whose contract ended: each still has a key.

Once a year, before the reporting season, list everyone with access to each property and remove anyone who no longer needs it. Keep the list with your records. It takes an hour, and it is the kind of control an auditor expects to see.

Reporting to Denver and the state

The City of Denver says Energize Denver applies to commercial and multifamily buildings in Denver that are 5,000 square feet and larger, with different requirements for small and large buildings (City of Denver, Energize Denver).

The Colorado Energy Office says Building Performance Colorado applies to most commercial buildings 50,000 square feet and larger, with benchmarking reports and fees due November 1 each year (Colorado Energy Office, Building Performance Colorado).

A large Denver building may report to both. One clean property record can feed both reports, but each program sets its own submission steps. Confirm current deadlines and rules with the City of Denver and the Colorado Energy Office before each cycle.

A realistic setup timeline

As a rough planning estimate, not a promise, setting up 50 buildings from scratch takes six to eight weeks:

  • Weeks 1 and 2. Building list, floor areas and their sources, and whole-building data requests to utilities.
  • Weeks 3 and 4. Meter mapping, and property records in the account.
  • Weeks 5 and 6. Loading data and running the checks above.
  • Weeks 7 and 8. Tenant data that arrived late, and a final review.

The calendar is driven less by the size of the portfolio than by how quickly utilities answer tenant data requests. Send those in week one, even before the building list is final.

Where to start

A Benchmarking Filing sets up Portfolio Manager in your name and prepares each building’s annual filing, from $950 per building a year, with verification fees extra. If the meter map is the real problem, start with a Peg Baseline, which ties every meter to a site and agrees the baseline in writing.