A customer record in Broker Forge has three layers: the business (one row), the service locations (one or more), and the meters (one ESI ID per meter). Getting this hierarchy right saves you hours when contracts and commissions roll in.
The fields, by section
Business
- Legal name — the name on the LOA and the REP contract. Has to match the entity that pays the electric bill.
- DBA — optional, shown on proposals to humanize the document.
- Primary contact — name, email, phone. This is who signs.
- Industry / size — used for matrix filtering. Some REPs price differently for certain NAICS codes.
Service location
- Street address, city, ZIP — used to map to the ERCOT zone (North, South, Houston, Coast, etc.) and the TDU (Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP, TNMP).
- TDU — derived from ZIP, but you can override if the customer is on the rare edge of two service territories.
- ERCOT zone — auto-filled. Important because some rate matrices are zone-specific.
Meter
- ESI ID — the 17-digit identifier ERCOT assigns to every Texas electric meter. This is the only number that uniquely identifies a meter.
- Annual usage (kWh) — used by rate search to filter to applicable tiers.
- Demand (kW) — optional but needed for any customer on a demand tariff.
- Current REP — used by the LOA template; pre-fills the "from" field.
Why ESI IDs matter so much
The ESI ID is what every downstream system uses. The LOA references it. The REP contract references it. ERCOT's enrollment system requires it. Without it, every step is a manual workaround.
If you don't have it from the customer, you have two options:
- Parse it from a bill. Drag a recent invoice onto the Bill Parser and the ESI ID drops onto the customer record automatically.
- Look it up by address. Use ESI ID Lookup, paste the service address, and the platform queries ERCOT's public MOI tool. Works for most addresses, fails for new construction or recently-split parcels.
Tips & gotchas
"ACME Inc." and "ACME, Inc." are different to REPs. If the LOA says one thing and the bill says another, the enrollment rejects and you wait three to five business days to retry. Copy-paste from the bill when in doubt.
A big C&I customer might have a dozen ESI IDs across multiple buildings. Add them all under one customer record, with a meter row for each. Quotes can aggregate, and commissions tie back to the parent automatically.
Use tags on customer records for anything that's not a structured field — segments, source ("referral", "cold outbound"), risk flags. Tags drive list filters and saved views.