Setting up virtual accounts
Virtual accounts are accounts whose data is automatically derived from the monthly data of other account, meters, or static attribute values. Use virtual data rules to populate virtual accounts with the source data of another account.
A simple example of a virtual account is where you copy data from one account to another. You might want to copy data from a scope 2 electricity account into a scope 3 virtual account so that you can allocate some of the electricity to a specific tenant of the building.
In another example, you might set up a blended fuel account for a location. If you want to separate ethanol and petrol for an E10 blended fuel, you can create a virtual account for ethanol and a virtual account for petrol with a 90:10 percentage split. The virtual rules calculate the split based on the monthly data and populate the virtual accounts.
The Virtual Data Rules grid displays all of the rules that you can associate with a virtual account. If you are an administrator, you can open it by clicking . From the grid, you can see the data type that is associated with each rule, the measure in the destination account that is populated, and a summary of the formula that populates each rule.
- In the Virtual Data Rule Editor, specify the measure that you want to populate in the destination data type, and then build the rule formula by using source data from another data type.
- Create an empty account with no records to use as the virtual account and set it up as a virtual account.
- Select the virtual data rule to populate the account. The definition of the rule defines how to populate the data.
- Choose the accounts or meters that will populate the measure in the destination account.
- Modify the contribution amount, if required, to adjust how much of the source data is used for the new account.