Skip to main content
Need help in this area? See Data Input FAQ.
Uploads let you get bills into Nectar when automatic connections aren’t an option — old paper bills, PDFs emailed by a client, a small utility that doesn’t have an online portal, or historical data the utility portal no longer shows. If you have a utility bill in any form, Nectar can probably read it. After an upload finishes, you can preview the file exactly as you submitted it and, when something looks wrong, reprocess a document with feedback so Nectar runs it again with your guidance. Navigate to Data Input > Uploads > New Upload to start uploading utility bills.

​
What makes a good upload

Not all files are created equal. Here’s what works best:
  • Clear, full-page PDF files are ideal — the kind you’d get downloading a bill directly from a utility website or receiving one as an email attachment.
  • PNG images work too, as long as the text is legible. Think high-resolution scans rather than photos taken from across the room.
  • Avoid blurry photos, cropped screenshots, password-protected files, or heavily compressed images.
A useful test: if you handed the document to a coworker and asked them to read the bill, could they? If yes, Nectar can handle it.
1

Select files

Drag and drop files onto the upload area, or click to browse files from your computer. Nectar accepts PDF, PNG, JPG, XLSX, and XLS formats.You can upload multiple files at once. Each file should contain a single utility bill for the best extraction results. The maximum is 100 files per upload, 50MB each.
2

Site & Account

Optionally specify which site and utility account these bills belong to. Nectar will automatically detect both from the bill contents — providing hints here improves accuracy when bills are ambiguous or cover multiple locations.
  • Site — Pre-assign all bills in this upload to a specific site. Leave as Auto-detect if bills may span multiple sites.
  • Account — Select a utility account to associate these bills with. Filters to accounts for the selected site. Leave as Auto-detect to let Nectar match automatically.
3

Options

Fine-tune how Nectar processes the upload:
  • Historical data — Enable this when uploading older bills that should not trigger automated routing or notifications. Historical bills are matched against all existing accounts and skip the bill pay pipeline. Enabled by default for new uploads.
  • Utility Types — Check the commodity types (Electricity, Gas, Water, etc.) if you know them. Leave unchecked to auto-detect.
  • Notes — Add any context that might help with processing, such as the billing period or a note about the source.
  • Skip duplicate detection — Toggle this on to force upload even if Nectar detects bills that may already exist. Use this for corrected or amended bills.

​
Upload jobs table

After submitting an upload, you can track its progress on the Uploads page. The table is organized into status tabs: Jobs created by Reprocess with feedback appear in the same table with a Reprocess source. Click any row to view the upload job details.

​
What happens after upload

Once you submit a file, three things happen automatically:
  1. Processing — Nectar’s AI reads the document and extracts service dates, total charges, usage amounts (kWh, therms, gallons, etc.), meter numbers, and account information. Most bills are processed in under five minutes.
  2. Matching — Nectar matches the extracted data to existing accounts and meters. If it finds a meter number it hasn’t seen before, it creates a new meter automatically and attaches it to the right site.
  3. Available — The bill and all its data appear in Data Inventory > Bills, ready for review, editing, and export.
Your as-uploaded file is kept with the upload job so you can preview or download it from the job detail page even while processing is still running.

​
Reprocess with feedback

If extraction missed a value, matched the wrong account, or otherwise needs another pass, open the upload job details page and choose Reprocess with feedback on that document. You provide required feedback (what went wrong and what Nectar should look for), and optionally override the site or account. Nectar:
  1. Queues a new upload job (source Reprocess) using the original file.
  2. Marks the source document as Reprocessed and links it to the new job.
  3. Replaces any bill created from that document with the result of the new run.
Track progress on the new job from Data Input > Uploads, the same way as a normal upload.

​
Duplicate detection

By default, Nectar checks every uploaded bill against existing documents to see if there’s a match. It compares the utility provider, account number, service dates, and total charges. If it finds a match, the upload is flagged as a potential duplicate. If it’s a real duplicate — great, Nectar caught it. No action needed. If it’s a false positive — this occasionally happens with corrected bills or amended invoices that share service dates with the original. You can contest the duplicate flag from the bill detail page in Data Inventory > Bills. To skip duplicate checking for a specific upload (for example, when you know the bill is a legitimate amendment), toggle Skip duplicate detection in the Options step.