For many organizations, it's helpful to set up a single "primary" account in Portfolio Manager to serve as a comprehensive portfolio and then share properties with staff accounts as needed. Here are some best practices EPA has identified for maintaining such an account. For help in first setting up a primary account, see this FAQ.
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Document and protect the login and password for your primary account.
- Only the Property Data Administrator (PDA) can delete a property. And deleted data cannot be recovered. When a PDA deletes a property, it's deleted from all other user accounts who have shared access.
- When a property is modified or meters are updated, Portfolio Manager logs the username and date for the change and this data can be pulled in reporting. If multiple staff members are using the same user account to access the properties, all actions will be attributed to the same user and our "Last Modified By" data won't help you track and investigate changes.
- All staff members should have their own Portfolio Manager account and access to each property should be shared based on the permissions they need to do their job. This way, if an employee leaves your company, you still have control of the property as PDA and you can quickly and easily remove the staff user account's access to the property. Portfolio Manager offers several levels of user permissions. Please see the information below for more detail:
- If you use a Service and Product Provider (SPP), or third-party vendor, to maintain your property data in Portfolio Manager, your organization should be the Property Data Administrator, PDA, ("owner") for all properties and you give the SPP shared access. If the SPP creates the property and maintains the PDA role, then they are technically the "owner" of the property in Portfolio Manager, and EPA will not be able to transfer this property to you without their permission.
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Incoming Transfers -
- When purchasing new properties, specify in the contract that you will get the Portfolio Manager record (if one exists) transferred to you.
- After you receive a new property by a transfer, review who has access. When ownership of a property is transferred to a different user account in Portfolio Manager, the old PDA account loses access, but all others retain their access. Review these "residual shares" that conveyed with the transfer and edit the sharing permissions as needed.
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Outgoing Transfers - If you have sold a property, make a copy of the property for your records (and change the name to indicate that it has been SOLD), then transfer the original version to the new owners to:
- Retain connections with the utility who may be automatically uploading energy data.
- Retain any ENERGY STAR Certifications associated with it.
- Maintain continuity for any State and Local Benchmarking ordinances.
- Review your corporate master account for duplicate copies of property profiles and rename (e.g. add the preface "OLD"), merge, update, or delete as needed. Often, when profiles are consolidated into a master account there may be multiple versions of the same property. After identifying duplicates, use the FAQs below to clean up the primary account.