Tenant Rebilling
Rebill utility costs to tenants with effective-dated bill % rules, an accounting workbook, and branded per-tenant statements.
Tenant Rebilling turns the utility bills Huckleberry already collects into tenant rebills. You tell it who your tenants are, which meters they sit on, and what percentage of each meter they are billed. For any period you choose, it produces two things:
- A coding workbook (Excel) — one row per meter, tenant, service and recoverability, with a period-by-period dollar grid, subtotals and a usage analysis. This is the file your accounting team codes from.
- Tenant statements (PDF) — one branded statement per tenant showing only that tenant’s lines, with usage, cost, $/unit, bill % and the amount billed, plus a 12-month history. This is the document you send the tenant.
Find it under Analytics → Utility Data → Utility Bills, then the Utility Billing button at the top of the page. Configuration lives beside it in Utility Billing — Setup.
Bill % are your commercial discretion, not a share of a whole. They don’t have to add up to 100% across a meter’s tenants, and a single tenant may be billed more than 100% if that’s what the lease says. There is no “unallocated” or “house” line on any output — whatever you don’t bill simply doesn’t appear.
Quick start
- Set up — in Utility Billing Setup, add your tenants, assign their meters, and add a bill % rule for each meter/tenant pair.
- Open — Utility Bills → Utility Billing.
- Scope — tick the sites to include (leave all unchecked for the whole portfolio) and, optionally, specific meters.
- Period — choose Monthly, Quarterly, Annual or Range and set the From/To dates.
- Bill % — saved rules resolve automatically; add an ad-hoc % here to override for this report only.
- Run — pick Excel and/or PDF on the Output step, then Run & download. The run is recorded and can be re-downloaded later.
Setting up tenants, meters and bill %
Utility Billing Setup has three tabs. Everything the wizard needs is configured here once, then reused on every run.
Tenants
Name is the only required field, but the rest matters downstream:
- Billing address — printed as the addressee on the tenant’s statement.
- Contact email / phone — who the statement goes to.
- Leased sq ft — feeds the square-footage bill % suggestion.
- Lease ref — your own reference for the lease.
- Active from / to — setting an Active to date deactivates a tenant while keeping it on historical reports.
Deactivate rather than delete. Deleting a tenant also removes its meter assignments. When a lease ends, set an Active to date instead — the tenant stays intact on every report you’ve already produced.
Meter assignments
Pick a tenant, see the meters assigned to it, and add or remove them. A meter can belong to several tenants — that’s the normal case for a shared house meter split across suites.
Bill % rules
A rule ties one meter to one tenant and says what portion of that meter’s cost the tenant is billed. Each rule carries a type, a recoverability, and an optional effective window.
| Type | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Fixed | You enter the percentage (25 = 25%). Any positive number is accepted, including over 100%. |
| Submeter | Always 100% — a dedicated sub-meter bills entirely to one tenant. No percentage to enter. |
| Square footage | No stored percentage. It’s suggested at run time pro-rata from the tenant’s leased sq ft against the building’s sq ft. Store it as a Fixed rule if you’d rather pin the number. |
Recoverability — CAM, Non-CAM or DOAH — is the accounting bucket that selects the GL code for the line. The code legend is configured for your account; a service and recoverability combination with no code simply leaves the Code cell blank, and the line still bills.
Effective from / to make rules date-aware, so a percentage can change part-way through a year and old periods still bill at the old rate. Leave Effective from blank to cover all periods, and Effective to blank to bill indefinitely.
Effective windows can’t overlap for the same meter and tenant, and the bounds are inclusive — a rule ending 28 Feb and another starting 28 Feb collide. Start the next window on the following calendar day.
Manual billing entries
Manual Billing Entries cover everything the provider feed doesn’t give you. All three kinds flow into the export automatically, and manual values take precedence over the automated feed.
- Manual meter — a meter on site that Huckleberry doesn’t receive automatically. You key its cost and usage per month.
- Override a provider line — replace a delivered cost or usage for one period when the delivered value is wrong. Deleting the override restores the original value.
- Flat fee / adder — fixed charges such as fire service, admin/CAM fees or stormwater, optionally recurring every month.
Each entry carries a period, service type, recoverability, cost, and optionally usage and unit. A flat fee attached to a tenant with no meter is billed 100% to that tenant, one line per applicable month.
The wizard, step by step
Six steps. The stepper at the top is clickable, so you can jump back at any point. Each step is checked when you press Next, and Run re-checks all six and drops you back on the first one that needs attention.
1. Scope
Tick the sites to include; leave everything unchecked to run the whole portfolio. Optionally narrow to specific meters — the meter picker is filtered to the sites you chose. Opening the wizard from a site page pre-selects that site.
2. Period
Choose Monthly, Quarterly, Annual or Range, then the From and To dates. Monthly produces a month-by-month grid; the other grains roll the same window up into fewer columns. The start date must be on or before the end date.
3. Bill %
The top of the step lists your saved rules, which resolve live when the report runs — if your setup is complete, there’s nothing to do here.
Below that, ad-hoc one-off bill % let you bill something differently just this once. One row per scoped meter is seeded automatically; fill in the tenant and the percentage as a whole number (enter 25 for 25%). + New tenant creates a tenant inline without leaving the wizard.
An ad-hoc % applies to this report only and never changes the saved rule. A row you leave completely blank is ignored, so a scoped meter you don’t bill won’t block the run — but a row with a percentage and no tenant (or the reverse) will be flagged.
4. Coding & columns
Include GL codes adds the Code column to the workbook. Group / subtotal by tenant, service and/or building controls the subtotal rows.
5. Output
Tick Excel (coding workbook), PDF (tenant statements), or both — at least one is required. When PDF is on you can tick specific tenants; leave the list empty to produce statements for every tenant with billed lines.
6. Run
A summary of the period, scope, GL setting, formats and how many bill % lines will be produced. Optionally tick Save this configuration as a reusable template and name it. Then Run & download.
What you get
The coding workbook (Excel)
The internal, accounting-facing output. The first sheet is one row per meter, tenant, service and recoverability, with the account number, service address, premise ID, service, meter, usage, unit, GL code, bill % and tenant — followed by one dollar column per period, then TOTAL rows per service, per tenant, and a grand total. Currency and percentage formats are applied, so the file opens correctly in Excel and Google Sheets.
The second sheet is a period-over-period usage analysis: usage per period with the percentage change against the prior period.
Tenant statements (PDF)
The tenant-facing document, one tenant per page in a combined file. Each statement carries your branding, the tenant’s name and billing address, the period, and a line table showing the month, service and meter, the meter’s full usage and cost, the blended $/unit rate, the bill % applied, and the amount billed.
Below the lines sit subtotals by service and recoverability, then the tenant’s total. Where history exists, the statement also shows a prior-period comparison (this period against the previous one and against the same period last year) and a 12-month history of cost by month.
A statement shows only that tenant’s lines — no other tenant’s figures ever appear. Tenants with no billed lines are skipped when you run for all tenants; asking for one specific tenant with no lines gives you a zero statement rather than an error.
Run history and templates
Every run is stored as an immutable snapshot. Run history lists them newest first with the run number, period, billed total and date, and re-downloads either artifact.
Old reports never change. A stored run re-renders from its own snapshot, so a statement you download six months from now is identical to the one you sent — even if the bill % rules, tenants or templates have changed since. (The tenant’s name and address are read live, so a corrected address does show on a re-download; the money never moves.)
Templates save a configuration: scope, columns, grouping, the GL toggle, period type and output formats. They deliberately do not save the dates or the bill % — you set the window for each run, and percentages always resolve live. Pick one from Run from template to pre-fill the wizard.
How the money is calculated
- Each line is the meter value multiplied by the bill %, rounded to the cent independently.
- Subtotals and totals are the sum of the already-rounded lines — never a re-multiplication — so a statement’s lines always add up to its total exactly.
- Quarterly and annual runs are computed monthly first and then rolled up, so a quarter equals the sum of its three months to the penny, and a percentage that changed mid-quarter is applied correctly to each month.
- There is no penny redistribution and no gross-up. Unbilled remainder is not tracked, reported, or assigned to anyone.
- Usage is rounded to three decimals, and a fixed-fee line with no usage stays blank rather than fabricating a number.
Troubleshooting
“Nothing to export” — the run produced no billed lines, and the message tells you which of the two causes it is: either there’s no invoice data for those meters in that period (check the year and the scope), or no bill % resolved for them (add a rule in Setup, or an ad-hoc % in step 3). You’re never handed an empty file.
A tenant is missing from the statements — that tenant produced no billed lines: either it has no meter assignment or bill % rule for the period, or there’s no utility data for its meters in that window.
I changed a rule — do my old reports change? No. Every run is stored as a snapshot and re-renders exactly as first produced.
My percentage changed mid-year — add a second rule with its own effective window rather than editing the first. Each month then bills at the rate that was in force.
Why is a Code cell blank? That service and recoverability combination has no code in your legend, or the service isn’t part of the legend at all. The line still bills; only the code is blank.
The wizard says a step needs attention when I press Run — running re-validates all six steps and jumps you to the first problem, so a step you skipped past can still stop the run.