Wikipedia defines an Edge Case as “a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter.” In the world of Scope 2 emissions and utility bills, the phrase “Edge Case” has come to mean a data wrinkle that just makes you scratch your head.
For example, we’ve seen utility bills issued without printing Current Charges, the current month’s expense. An energy bill printed with no units of measure? Seen that too. Or water bills that are issued once every six months, or energy bills that are issued and paid on an estimated basis, then undergo a true-up at the end of the year.
If life were simple, these events would be rare. For emissions data, these frictions and wrinkles are all too common. The source of the problem is utility bills: they are dense, diverse and just darn complicated! Plus, sometimes they omit key items. Frustrating as this may be, you simply can’t get to emissions data without going through utility bills.
There is no API for utility bill data. As an investor recently told us, “this is yet another under-digitalized industry.” Yep. If the financial world has the unbanked, i.e. the folks who don’t have access to a banking account, the emissions world has the under-digitalized, folks who can’t get a stream of clean data.
GLYNT was built to solve this problem: Capture the bills. Extract the Data. Untangle the Data. Deliver Ready-to-use Data.
Our goal is to make emissions data an everyday business flow. This means cracking the code on how to get utility bills, and then how to accurately extract the data from the bills. The same system can be used on “Landlord bills”, screenshots of online systems, accounting records and more. Finally, our goal is also to create apples-to-apples data from diverse utility bill data schemas. Invoices from heating oil, propane and butane delivery systems can be put into the same, organized format.
At this point, if your head is spinning from the many Edge Cases and complexities of emissions data, welcome to the club.
And relax. GLYNT built the end-to-end solution that smooths out the edginess of emissions data. Get in touch and we’ll get you started. We’ve seen the Edge Cases and conquered them.
