The whole cycle, handled as a pipeline.
From vendor bill PDF to resident invoice PDF — every step in one workflow, every charge auditable, every cycle reconciled to the dollar. The flagship platform Otto is built around.
RUBS · submetered · fixed fee · Every allocation method, every charge traceable to the vendor bill it came from.
Dump what you have. Otto builds the property.
Setup is where utility billing implementations stall — weeks of manual entry before a single invoice ships. Otto takes the exports you already have and does the assembly. Iris maps what it can, flags what it can't, and shows exactly what's left before the property can go live.
Every property carries a state. Inactive, in setup, ready, live — with the missing pieces named, not guessed at. The portfolio view shows the whole pipeline at once, so the team can see how close each property is to its first cycle without asking anyone.
Four steps. One cycle.
Every cycle moves through the same pipeline — from vendor bill ingestion to resident invoice delivery — with guardrails at every stage that catch problems before they become invoice errors.
Upload your bill
Drop a vendor bill PDF. Otto's AI reads every charge, meter, and service address in seconds. No data entry.
Reads & rent roll
Pull submeter reads, sync occupancy from your PMS or rent roll. Otto reconciles the inputs and flags anomalies.
Calculate & review
RUBS, submeter, fixed fee — every allocation method handled. Show-your-math audit trail on every charge.
Approve and ship
Review the totals, approve the cycle, ship in one action. Branded invoices generated and emailed to residents automatically.
Everything the operator does, handled as a pipeline.
End-to-end cycle automation, real-time meter intelligence, and batch workflows that let routine cycles ship in one action. This is what scales a billing company past the limits of legacy software.
- End-to-end cycle automation — bills ingested, validated, allocated, and moved toward approval without operator touch
- Billing cycle workflow — open, review, approve, ship, close. Full Show-Your-Math audit trail on every charge.
- Batch approval workflows — one action per routine cycle after reviewing the summary dashboard
- Live meter map per property — every master, common-area, and submeter in one visual
- Real-time meter health rules — stale reads, reverse reads, AMI freshness windows
- Consumption anomaly alerts — usage spikes, zero usage on occupied, >3× rolling average
- Problems surfaced before they corrupt a cycle, not after invoices ship
- Automated estimation when a read is missing, stale, or fails validation — the cycle doesn't stall on one bad meter
- Estimates account for unit occupancy — a vacant unit doesn't inherit an occupied unit's average
- Proposed, not applied — every estimate goes to human review and approval before it enters a cycle
- Estimated reads carry the flag onto the invoice and the audit trail — a regulator can see which reads were estimated and why
- Vendor bill OCR — line-item extraction, automated validation. Accuracy improves with every bill processed.
- Handles multi-page omnibus bills (18-page JEA, complex City of Houston, Illinois American, KAW)
- Vendor-bill period mismatches caught before they affect the cycle
- RUBS (sqft, occupant, combo, equal share), submetered (BTR + BTB), fixed fee, hybrid per-property
- Recovery cap enforcement · CAD (common-area deduction) percentage or structural
- Sewer-follows-water — no separate discharge reads needed
- Day-based proration · final-read proration on move-out
- Property Fees — recurring charges like trash and pest control that aren't derived from a utility calculation, billed on the same statement
- Charge bundling — miscellaneous water line items rolled into a single "Water" charge. The resident sees one number, not six.
- Fees prorate and follow the same move-in / move-out rules as utility charges
- The math stays itemized underneath — bundling changes what the resident reads, never what the audit trail records
- Read on move-out, ship same day — no waiting for the next cycle
- Faster security-deposit returns · cleaner owner P&L close
- Generates final invoice with prorated charges, sent to forwarding address on file
- The capability legacy software lacks — a real differentiator at lease-up scale
- White-label invoices — your brand, your logo, your statement. Otto doesn't sign the resident's bill.
- Otto-only utility statement or consolidated billing rolled into the rent statement
- Email delivery with PDF, generated and sent on approval
- Mailroom exports — USPS presort files for physical mailing providers, for the residents and owners who still need paper
- Lease updates flow in — new leases, renewals, move-outs, and rent roll changes land without re-keying
- Charges post back — approved utility charges hit the resident ledger in the PMS, no double entry, no export-and-import
- Otto stays the system of record for the math; the PMS stays the system of record for the ledger
- Two-way sync where it makes sense, one-way pulls where the PMS owns the truth. See integrations →
- 12-report library — Pre-Billing, Cycle Close, Meter Health, Vacancy Loss, Recovery Trend, Consumption Anomalies, and more
- XLSX, PDF, CSV export on every report. Global search across the portfolio.
- State-by-state compliance guardrails honored in allocation logic. See compliance →
- Configurable disclosure language per property and per state
Meet Iris.
Otto runs the platform. Iris runs the work. She's Otto's AI colleague — a billing analyst who reads the meters, watches the rates, fetches the bills, and speaks up when something doesn't reconcile. She remembers every cycle and never confuses two properties.
On the operator side, Iris is ambient — she shows up inside the surfaces she's affecting, never as a chatbot dock. She announces; she does not alert. You stay in control: Iris proposes, you approve. Every action she takes preserves intent, evidence, and proposal in human-readable form, so "why did you flag this?" always has a real answer.
Trust grows over time. v1 Iris asks permission for everything; v2 Iris auto-handles the cycles you've trained her on; v3 Iris runs the routine work and you only see exceptions. The protocol doesn't change — only the gate moves.
The operational layer, built next.
Two capabilities currently in development, included in Otto Billing at no additional per-unit cost when they ship. These are the workflows that turn a billing platform into the system of record for the whole operation.
Otto Invoice Processing
Unified vendor bill dashboard, payment status tracking, bulk ACH workflows, billing cadence alerting, P&L reconciliation. Every vendor bill in one view, with payment running through Otto.
Learn more In developmentOtto VUCR
Vacant Unit Cost Recovery — automatic vacant unit detection, untransferred service alerts, automated recovery charges, admin fee configuration, owner-facing recovery reporting.
Learn moreResidents land on your portal, not Otto's by default.
Every Otto Billing customer can route residents to their existing portal. Otto's resident invoice email and bill PDF link to the URL you specify — your AppFolio portal, your Yardi RentCafé, your custom property site. The handoff is built into Otto Billing, no add-on required. When you're ready for an Otto-branded resident experience, the Otto Resident bundle adds it.
Add a resident-facing layer.
When you're ready for more — a branded portal, AI Tier 1 support, and direct-to-bank payments — the Otto Resident bundle is the next step.
See Otto Billing on your actual cycle.
30-minute demo, zero pressure. Bring one of your real vendor bills — we'll OCR it live. Then we'll talk about what a parallel cycle against your current software would look like.
You'll talk directly to the founder who built Otto. Not a BDR, not a sales engineer.