# Normalized consumption panels

URL: https://municorn.us/build/normalized-consumption-panels/
Updated: 2026-09-08
Tags: build, consumption, rates

> **Cite as:** Municorn.us, "Normalized consumption panels", Municorn water loss index, https://municorn.us/build/normalized-consumption-panels/ (source filings retrieved 2026-09-08).
> **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ — reuse and redistribution are permitted with attribution to Municorn.us and a link to this URL.
> **Caveat that must travel with these figures:** "Water loss" is at least three different quantities depending on the jurisdiction, and nothing here supports a comparison between states.

A utility's billing extract turned into one row per account and period, on a consistent class and meter-size vocabulary, with every period that could not be relied on flagged and the reason for the flag kept beside it.

## What it is

A billing extract, as it comes out of a utility's system, put onto one shape: one row per account per billing period, with the class code, the meter size, the days in the period and the consumption on it. Account classes are mapped onto a single vocabulary so that a commercial account in one export and a commercial account in another are counted as the same thing.

The part that costs a study its first two weeks is not the arithmetic. It is finding out which periods are complete, which class codes mean what, which meters were changed mid-period, and which readings cannot be true. That work happens once here and is written down.

## What you hand us

The billing extract. It does not need to be clean, and it does not need to be in any particular format — one file per year, one file per cycle, a report somebody exports by hand, or a database dump. If the utility can only produce it as a PDF, say so early, because that changes what the work is.

We do not connect to a billing system. This is a file you send and a file you get back.

## What you get back

The panel, and a reason column.

Every period that could not be relied on stays in the panel and is flagged, with the reason recorded on the row: the period was partial, the class code did not map to anything, the consumption is not physically possible for that meter, or the meter was changed part-way through. Nothing is silently dropped. A panel with a hole in it and no note beside the hole cannot be checked by the person who has to defend the study built on it.

**What gets excluded from the study is your decision, not ours.** The panel gives you the flag and the reason; which flags you exclude, and what you say about it in the study, is yours.

## What it is built from

The utility's own records, and nothing else. This is not built from the public corpus, no figure in it comes from a regulator's file, and none of it is published anywhere by us.

## What it does not do

It does not correct a reading. Where a consumption figure cannot be true, it is flagged as implausible and left as filed. Replacing it with an estimate would put a number in the panel that no meter produced.

It does not tell you what a class ought to be. Where a class code is not in the utility's own documentation, it is flagged as unmapped and left for somebody who can ask.

It does not reconstruct a period that was never billed. A gap in the billing record is reported as a gap.

It is not a water balance and it is not an audit. It is the consumption side, put in order, so a cost-of-service allocation can start.

_Municorn.us · https://municorn.us/build/normalized-consumption-panels/ · CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ · source filings retrieved 2026-09-08_

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