EnergyPrint At 15: How A Minnesota Software Firm Is Utilizing AI To Transform Energy Management

In an industry that’s long relied on clunky PDFs and unreliable optical character recognition (OCR) scans, EnergyPrint has quietly transformed the way businesses view energy management. Now celebrating 15 years in operation, the Minnesota-based company is forging a new era, driven by the AI-powered tool: Invoiage.

Matt Gamble, COO of EnergyPrint, shares, “Originally, the idea was just to give contractors and business owners clearer insight into how their buildings operate. But the more data we tried to collect, the more we realized the data itself was often the problem, with error rates reaching a staggering 10%. Unreliable data is extremely costly to clean up manually.”

The problem? Utility bills are notoriously hard to read and even harder to analyze. With over 3,000 electric utility providers in the U.S., most of which routinely change the format, language, and structure of their invoices, traditional OCR software often fumbles.

What started in 2009 as a contractor-driven initiative to help businesses lower their energy spend has evolved into a data-forward operation reshaping how building owners, facility managers, and corporations understand their utility consumption and what they can do to improve it.

In 2023, EnergyPrint rolled out Invoiage, an internal AI-powered software platform designed to do what OCR couldn’t: read and accurately extract data from thousands of ever-changing utility bills, with precision and speed. Wade Smith, CEO of EnergyPrint, even envisions, “Our goal is Six Sigma level performance, because, when you’re managing millions of dollars in utility costs, even a small error can be very expensive.”

Furthermore, the impact of Invoiage has allowed them to scale. “We used to shy away from large accounts, now we’re actively seeking them,” Smith shares. That scalability has opened new doors as well. EnergyPrint is now courting third-party bill pay companies, who can benefit from faster, more affordable, and vastly more accurate utility data. “As your quality goes up, your costs come down,” he explains.

For EnergyPrint clients, the advantages go beyond better software, with tangible cost-saving results. For instance, a 40-story building that was built in the early 1900s has been tracking its utility bills since 2008 with EnergyPrint. Thanks to its cutting-edge technology, this software company has been able to cut down the costs by 35%, representing nearly $3 million in electricity savings alone. “That building is a case study in what happens when data meets action,” Smith confirms.

This is the true promise of EnergyPrint: empowering customers not just to understand their energy data, but to act on it. And with the ability to drill down to specific equipment, may it be rooftop units, chillers, or even as small as toasters, building operators can now monitor and optimize performance with surgical precision.

Though EnergyPrint offers its own analytics package, the company is just as comfortable being a behind-the-scenes enabler. Clients can take the clean, structured data Invoiage delivers and plug it into their own systems, spreadsheets, or dashboards. “We’re not trying to lock anyone into our ecosystem,” Gamble says. “We just want to be the cleanest, most reliable source of utility data.”

That philosophy extends to pricing, too. Unlike some competitors, EnergyPrint does not charge clients to fix errors in data delivery. “We’ll make it right, period,” affirms Gamble.

And, as the world shifts toward greener, smarter buildings, EnergyPrint plans to stay at the forefront, not just as a data provider, but as a change agent. “Clean energy starts with clean data,” Smith concludes. “That’s the foundation of everything we do.”