Sites and contacts
The places and people that tie your data together
A site is a location in your workspace, usually a street address such as a home or business. A contact is the person or business at a site, such as a homeowner or program participant.
Together they link everything else:
- the devices and meters installed at the site
- the grid elements the site is connected to, through its meter
- the contact's program enrollments
A contact is usually linked to one site, but can be linked to several. A contact doesn't have an address of its own: location comes from their sites.
One person, several names#
A contact appears under different names depending on where you look. They're all the same record:
| Where | Term |
|---|---|
| Contacts, enrollment status | Contact |
| Run a program guides, report exports | Member |
| Event targeting | Participant |
| API | Customer (customerId) |
In Admin, "member" means something else: a person in your organization who signs in to Texture.
Reference IDs#
Sites and contacts each have a reference ID: your own identifier, such as the account number in your CRM or billing system. A contact's reference ID is unique within a workspace. If you create a contact with a reference ID that already exists, Texture updates that contact instead of creating a second one.
How sites and contacts are created#
| How | What's created |
|---|---|
| Texture Connect | A customer enters their details when they connect devices with a Connect link. Texture creates the contact and their site. |
| Program enrollment | Someone enrolls with their address. Texture creates the contact and their site. |
| Bulk import | You upload sites, customers, and devices. |
| Dashboard | You click Add Site on the Sites page, or create a contact on the Contacts page. |
| API | POST /v1/sites and POST /v1/customers. See the API reference. |
Texture turns each site's address into map coordinates. Two sites in a workspace can share an address.
What Texture adds to a site#
- Weather: current conditions for the site's location. See Signals.
- Utility and market: the utility territory and wholesale market the site is in.
Through the API, you can also request a site's permits, utility statements, interval data, and energy modeling, where your workspace has those data sources set up.
Where to find them#
Find a site or contact with global search, by name, address, email, phone, or reference ID. See Look up a member or site.
The site page#
Open a site from Sites or from Explore. The page shows:
- Overview: map, weather, and primary contact
- Site Details: name, address, coordinates, site ID, reference ID, and created date
- Meters & Usage: the site's meters and usage. No meters connected means no meter has been placed at the site yet. See Meters.
- Devices
- Grid Infrastructure: the transformer, feeder, and substation above the site, plus its utility and wholesale market
- Energy: solar, battery, and grid charts
- Program Enrollments
- Recent Activity, filtered by alerts, connection, or updates
- Alerts, when the site has open alerts
Use Edit Site or Delete Site at the top of the page.
The contact page#
Open a contact from Contacts. The page shows:
- Contact Details: name, email, phone, contact ID, and reference ID
- Site(s) & Devices
- Program Enrollments
- Registered Systems
- Connect Sessions: the contact's Texture Connect sessions, if they used one
Contact records hold personal information. Limit who can access them, and make sure your webhook endpoints and API integrations follow your privacy requirements.