Switching between email and online connections

It’s common for the same utility account to be ingested two different ways during onboarding:

• You set up an email connection first — forwarding bills to your Nectar inbox while you wait for portal access.
• Later, the utility account holder grants portal access and you create an online connection for the same account.

Both connections then collect the same bills. This page explains how to consolidate them so you end up with a single clean history on one connection.

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Why consolidate?

When two connections cover the same utility account, you’ll see:

• Duplicate bills showing up under Data quality issues every billing cycle.
• A split history — older months under the email connection, recent months under the online connection — making year-over-year comparisons harder.
• Two accounts in the Accounts page for what is really one account at the utility.

Consolidating gives you a single account with a continuous bill history on the connection type you want to use going forward.

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Move from email to online (typical)

This is the common direction: you’ve forwarded bills by email during onboarding, you’ve now connected the utility portal, and you want the portal to be the source of truth going forward.

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What you do

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What to include in the support request

Provide one row per pair you want consolidated: You can find a connection’s ID in the URL of its detail page. If you’d rather not look up IDs, listing the utility provider and the company name in the ticket is enough — support can match them up.

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What support does

Once the request is in:

1. Pulls available history from the online portal back to your data collection start date so the online connection holds everything the portal can give.
2. Compares bills on the email connection against the online connection account by account.
3. Moves any gap-filling bills from the email side onto the matching online accounts so older months you only had via email aren’t lost.
4. Flags accounts that exist on email but not on the portal (for example, an unmetered “sign” or flat-rate billing account some utilities never expose online) and asks you whether to delete them, keep them on the email connection, or try to add them to the online portal.
5. Deactivates and removes the email connection for that utility once you confirm. Bills already moved stay on the online connection’s accounts. The original PDFs remain accessible from each bill’s detail page.

The order matters: history is pulled from the portal before anything is deleted, so you never end up with a window where bills are gone but not yet re-collected.

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What happens to duplicates that already exist

If both connections collected the same bill (same statement date and total) before consolidation, the duplicates show up on the Issues page under Potential duplicates. After consolidation, support resolves the duplicates that came from the email side — you don’t need to clear them manually first.

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Move from online to email (less common)

You might want this if the account holder revokes portal access, the utility deprecates its portal, or you’d rather receive bills by email going forward.

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What you do

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What support does

1. Moves the online connection’s accounts, meters, and bills onto the email connection so the history is preserved on the connection you’re keeping.
2. Deactivates or deletes the online connection based on your preference. Deactivation is reversible — you can reconnect later if portal access returns. Deletion is permanent.
3. Leaves your portal credentials encrypted on the deactivated record until you confirm deletion, so a future reactivation doesn’t require re-entry.

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After consolidation

• Year-over-year analytics in Analytics > Consumption will treat the merged history as a single continuous series.
• The meters keep their identifiers so reports, exports, and integrations that reference them by ID don’t break.
• Webhook subscribers receive connection.deleted (or connection.deactivated) for the removed side and continue to receive bill events from the surviving connection — see Webhooks.

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What you can clean up yourself with bulk actions

A full account / meter / bill move between connections is currently a support operation (see above). But several of the cleanup steps around it are self-serve through the bulk actions on the Data Inventory tables. Useful ones in this context:

• Stop collection on the email side without deleting anything. Open Data Inventory > Accounts, filter by the email connection, select the affected rows, and use Mark as not tracked. Existing history stays in place; no new bills will be collected. This is the safest first step before support runs the consolidation.
• Bulk-delete duplicate emailed bills. If duplicates from the email side are still showing up under Data Quality > Issues, open Data Inventory > Bills, filter to the email connection (and optionally a date range), select the duplicates, and use Delete bills. Confirmation is required and the action cannot be undone — make sure you’re deleting the email-side copies, not the canonical online-side bills.
• Merge duplicate meters that ended up on the same online account. Sometimes the same physical meter gets two records on the online account (slightly different identifiers from the portal vs the emailed bill). On Data Inventory > Meters, filter to the affected account, select the duplicates, and use Merge meters. The merge preview shows identifiers, coverage, and usage so you can confirm before committing. Selected meters must share the same account and same utility type — which is the typical state after support has finished the move.
• Set tags on the consolidated meters with Set tags so the freshly-merged history is easy to slice in Analytics and exports.
• Snapshot what you have for the move. Use Export accounts on the Accounts page and Export meters on the Meters page to capture a before-state CSV/Excel that you can attach to the support request. Both exports are available without edit permission.

What you can’t do yourself today (these are the gaps that require support):

• Bulk-reassign bills from one account or connection to another.
• Move meters between accounts (admin-only).
• Delete an account row entirely.
• Delete a connection while preserving its history on a different connection.

These are the gaps a self-serve consolidation flow will close.

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Tips for avoiding the situation entirely

If you’re early in onboarding:

• Set up online connections first when portal access is already in hand. Save email connections for utilities where you can’t get portal credentials.
• Use invitations or magic links to ask the account holder to enter their own portal credentials directly, without sending you the password.
• Disable any pre-existing auto-forwards the moment a corresponding online connection goes live — don’t wait until consolidation.

If you can’t avoid running both for a stretch, you can still keep things clean by setting the data collection start date on the new online connection to the first day after the last bill the email connection processed. That way the two connections cover different windows and don’t generate duplicates while you wait for consolidation.

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FAQ

See also: Glossary — Connection, Glossary — Connection status, Email connections, Connections, Reconnecting.