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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Utility Bill Processing on AWS

Unlock sustainability insights by converting public utility invoices into machine data

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Overview

This Guidance demonstrates how organizations can derive sustainability insights by converting utility invoices into machine-readable data using an automated pipeline and generative AI technology. By automating the extraction of key data points from any utility invoice, organizations can normalize the data and gain insights into their emissions usage. This addresses the challenge businesses face in emissions footprint reporting and insights based on their real estate portfolio, given the lack of programmatic access to invoice data.

How it works

This architectural diagram illustrates a scalable approach to processing utility invoices into machine-readable data from binary image sources. This framework can be used to automate the extraction process, apply custom data transformations, and generate insights for sustainability reporting purposes.

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Deploy with confidence

Ready to deploy? Review the sample code on GitHub for detailed deployment instructions to deploy as-is or customize to fit your needs. 

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Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

This Guidance uses standard service metrics to monitor the health of individual pipeline components, such as Lambda function concurrency or error rate. In addition, Amazon CloudWatch metrics, alarms, and dashboards can be customized to monitor the operational health of this Guidance and notify operators of any faults.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

The resources deployed through this Guidance are safeguarded through the policies and principles of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Least-privilege access and role-based access controls should be used to grant operators the necessary permissions to modify resources, such as deploying an updated stack through AWS CloudFormation.

Read the Security whitepaper 

This Guidance uses infrastructure-as-code in an AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). These CDK stacks are deployed through CloudFormation for resilient change management that will automatically rollback if a fault is detected during deployment. In addition, by using loosely coupled dependencies like EventBridge rules, this Guidance can handle ingestion events from Amazon S3 and implement retries on downstream quota limits. These services enhance reliability through a decoupled, scalable, and serverless architecture, allowing for automatic scaling, reliable event processing, reduced operational overhead, and consistent, repeatable deployments through infrastructure-as-code.

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

This Guidance is designed to scale in order to meet the processing requirements for utility invoices. It employs a queueing mechanism to regulate the rate at which invoices are processed. For customers with large, consistent inference workloads, they can request an increase to the Lambda concurrency limit and use the provisioned throughput model of Amazon Bedrock so that the application's performance needs are adequately addressed.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

The selection of serverless technologies that can be configured with this Guidance reduces costs that are directly correlated to the number of invoices processed. For the storage of binary invoice documents, this Guidance uses the Amazon Simple Storage Service Intelligent-Tiering storage class or Amazon S3 Lifecycle configuration policies. These policies can lower the long-term storage costs or eliminate the long-term storage of documents entirely.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

This Guidance uses Amazon S3 to store invoices, which represent the largest data type within the application. AWS customers have the ability to make minor adjustments to achieve their ideal data storage configuration by using Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering or Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies, as outlined in the Cost Optimization section. Amazon S3 enables the optimization of data storage through energy-efficient tiers while also reducing the carbon footprint through the shared infrastructure and renewable energy usage.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.