Upload the electricity, water, and gas bills as they arrive and see cost per site, usage per period, and every due date laid out on one calendar. The month a site doubles its consumption stops being something you notice a quarter later in an accounting review.
The app embedded on this page is the Internal Docs App, a real Taskade Genesis build you can browse right now. It keeps documents organized and findable, which is the storage half of a bill tracker. Click "Use this app" to clone it in about ten seconds, add the site, cost, usage, and due date columns, then put the upload form and the reading step in front of it.
The build is simple and the value compounds. A Sites Project lists your locations and a Bills Project holds one row per bill, kept as connected records so a site with four utilities is still one site. A published form takes site, utility type, and a File field. The Convert File to Text step reads the bill, and utility bills are a good example of why one step matters: they arrive as clean supplier PDFs, as scans from a landlord, and as phone photos of a posted bill, and all three go the same way. An Ask Agent step returns supplier, account number, site or meter address, billing period start and end, usage quantity with its unit, rate, standing charge, tax, total, and due date. Usage and cost become numeric columns, which is what turns a pile of PDFs into a comparison.
The cost picture renders where the question lives:
- Calendar view for every due date and billing period across sites
- Table view to compare cost and usage per site and per period
- Board view to move bills through Received, Approved, and Paid
- Plus List, Mind Map, Gantt, and Org Chart across the 7 project views
Automations turn a bill into a warning. With Taskade automations, a bill due in five days pings the person who pays it, a usage figure more than a set percentage above the same period last year notifies the facilities owner, and a missing bill for a site is chased on the day it was expected. Across 100+ bidirectional integrations, Gmail pulls supplier emails in while Slack and Google Sheets push cost summaries out. The AI agents inside the app carry 34 built-in tools with persistent memory, so an agent can answer "which site had the biggest jump last quarter" against your own bills.
Seed your sites and meters before the first bill goes in. A bill that cannot find its site creates a stray row, and twenty stray rows make the comparison useless, so half an hour of setup pays for itself in the first month. Record the meter reference as its own field even when you only have one meter per site, because the day a landlord splits a supply you will be glad the structure was already there. Load twelve months of history if you have it. Year on year comparison is the entire point of the build, and it only works if last year exists in the data.
Clone the app, invite facilities and finance, and the bills, the readings, and the alert thresholds are yours.
Read the intake pattern in Build a Document Intake App, the format list in Read Scanned Paperwork and Photos, and the reminder mechanics in Automation Triggers. See Finance Apps for reporting on top, browse live builds in the Community Gallery, or start from the templates library. Pair this with Send Supplier Invoices Straight to an Approval Board for the payment path and Track Certificates of Insurance Before They Expire for the rest of the property compliance pack.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can it separate usage from cost?
Yes, and that separation is the reason to build it. Ask for usage quantity with its unit as its own field, separate from rate, standing charge, tax, and total. Only then can you compare kilowatt hours across sites rather than just comparing invoice amounts.
What if suppliers format bills completely differently?
They will, and the extraction works from meaning rather than position, so a different layout still yields a total and a period. Fields genuinely absent from a bill come back blank and the row is flagged, which is how you discover that one supplier never prints a meter reading.
Can it handle multiple meters on one bill?
Yes. Ask for a list of meters with reading and usage, and write those into a connected Project so one bill can carry several meters without flattening them into a single number.
Does it work for bills that arrive by post?
Photograph the page. A phone photo is read the same way as a supplier PDF, and HEIC files from an iPhone need no conversion. Keep photos under 20 MB, which is the ceiling for reading words off an image.
How do I get an alert when consumption spikes?
Set the threshold in an automation comparing the new usage figure against the same period last year on the same site. The alert lands in Slack or by email with the two figures in it.
Do the original bills stay available?
Yes. Each file attaches to its bill row and lands in your workspace Media tab, so a query with the supplier starts from the document they sent.
Can property managers upload on my behalf?
Yes. Share the published form, and turn on app sign-in through App Users if you want each upload attached to a named person. A branded portal on your own domain is available on Business plans and above.
Can it handle estimated bills followed by an actual?
Ask for a field recording whether the reading is estimated or actual, which most bills state on the face. The trend then shows estimates distinctly, so a correcting bill is understood as a correction rather than read as a genuine spike.
