Documentation, files and getting data out

Service reports, spreadsheets and folders — the unglamorous routes that connect systems with no interface — plus how to get your own data back out of Properate.

Not every source has an interface, and waiting for one is often the wrong plan. A surprising amount of useful data arrives as a file somebody already produces every month, and connecting that is usually quicker than getting a supplier to build an integration.

Service reports and technician work

SDF — service reports and action lists carried out by technicians, collected from an external system and shown alongside the equipment they concern.

The value here is placement rather than the data itself. A service report that sits in an email folder is effectively lost: the next person to stand in front of that air handling unit will not find it. Attached to the unit in FDV, the history is where the question gets asked.

Files and folders

Google Drive — reads spreadsheet files from a folder you share. Whoever produces the file keeps producing it exactly as they do today; dropping it in the folder is the whole integration.

This is worth considering wherever a system has no interface but somebody exports from it regularly — a tenant billing system, an older energy monitoring tool, a consultant's monthly summary.

If your data is in an unfamiliar format

Support can normally add a reader for a file-based format. What is needed is a couple of real example files — not a specification, and not a cleaned-up version. Real files show the quirks: the merged header row, the comma decimal separator, the month written in Norwegian, the blank line before the totals.

Two things make this go faster:

Send several files, from different months. One file shows the format; three show what varies.

Say what the columns mean where it is not obvious, and which figure you actually care about. Column names in exports are frequently misleading.

Documents in FDV

Beyond data, Properate holds the building's documents — manuals, drawings, certificates, inspection reports — attached to the building, the system or the component they belong to. Two things are worth knowing:

File access is controlled per building, separately from access to the building itself. If a building looks unexpectedly empty of documents rather than empty of data, that is usually the reason.

Attaching a document to a component rather than to the building makes it findable by the person who needs it. A manual filed at building level in a portfolio of forty buildings is close to unfindable.

Getting your data out again

Integrations run in both directions, and you are not locked in.

Excel export — every module view can be exported. This is the right tool for a one-off question, a board paper, or reconciling against an invoice.

ESG API — structured access to energy, water, consumption and tenant data for your own reporting. Use this when a figure is needed repeatedly, in your own systems, rather than copied by hand each quarter.

If you are exporting the same view to Excel every month, that is the signal to look at the API instead — or to ask support whether a scheduled report would do the job.

Worth knowing

File-based data arrives when the file arrives. If a monthly file is late, the data is late, and nothing is broken. It is worth knowing which of your sources work this way, because they cannot be expected to be current.

A renamed column can stop a reader. If a file-based source goes quiet after months of working, the most common cause is that whoever produces the file changed something in it. Send the newest file to support and it can usually be fixed quickly.