EnergyCAP 3.4.0 is now available for EnergyCAP-hosted clients! The first user to log in this week will see the update notice in the Login Manager and should click on the prompts to complete the upgrade. 

This upgrade includes exciting improvements to the ENERGY STAR interface, as well as support for the optional custom report designer Plug-In for Excel®. Read on to find out more about the new features.

ENERGY STAR

In this release, EnergyCAP gives users greater flexibility in determining how billing data is submitted to ENERGY STAR.

Global Minimum Billing Period Setting—Clients can now set the earliest billing period that should be submitted to ENERGY STAR. This provides a convenient way for clients to prevent older (less reliable) data from being submitted to the rating system. ENERGY STAR ratings may not be successfully returned if there are gaps in the historical billing record. Setting the Global Minimum Billing Period appropriately can improve your success rate for ENERGY STAR building rating submissions.

Identifying Modified Building—The ENERGY STAR submission tab in EnergyCAP has been improved to show the relevant ENERGY STAR rating dates for each building to help identify which buildings would be submitted automatically based on modified data. The last date that a building received a rating and the last date something changed within a building, meter or bill associated with the building will both be displayed in the submission grid. This should allow users to quickly identify the state of all ENERGY STAR-enabled buildings.

Schema Updates—The latest round of ENERGY STAR schema changes have been incorporated into the EnergyCAP user interface. Users can now set the “Percent Occupancy” of a building and note which space types are ratable. Clients can apply this update, and future updates, from the ENERGY STAR submission tab in Bill Processing.

Improved Logging—The ENERGY STAR submission grid will now contain a link to a downloadable Excel file that logs each building that was submitted, the meters submitted, and the first/last bill billing period that was submitted with that meter. This log should greatly improve client and techical support debugging of ENERGY STAR submission issues.

EnergyCAP Report Designer Option

The forthcoming Excel plugin for ad hoc query and report design using EnergyCAP data requires installation of EnergyCAP 3.4.0 or greater. Contact EnergyCAP Sales (Sales@EnergyCAP.com) if you would like to see a demo of the plugin and/or obtain pricing. EnergyCAP-hosted customers will receive first access to the plugin, which should be available in Q4 of 2015.

Bug Fixes

There are also a number of bug fixes in Release 3.4.0. For more information, click here to read the release notes.