An energy “filing” can be a 400-page rate case or a one-line notice that Thursday’s hearing moved to Friday. Many systems of record treat these identically. We at Halcyon don’t think they should. We want to help you quickly find the document that you know exists. It is just keeping bad company.

So before you run a search or set up an alert, the smartest move is to shrink the pile first. That is exactly what Halcyon’s “Filing type” filters do. Building these was a labor of love, and that’s the reason they work better than you would expect.

One Vocabulary Instead of 50

Every commission names things its own way. One calls a settlement a “joint proposal.” Another calls it a “Settlement Agreement.” A third buries it inside a generic “Pleading” bucket and wishes you luck. If you want every settlement filed across three states, you would normally have to learn three filing-type dialects before you could even start.

Halcyon collapses all of that into one standardized set of categories that means the same thing everywhere. Want the settlements? Filter to stipulation and search once. You get two things out of it: comparable documents line up across jurisdiction, and — because the platform now reads a tighter, cleaner set of filings — sharper answers when you query.

You will find the Filing types filter in the Search pane.

Halcyon’s standardized categories have a little Halcyon icon; the labels a commission publishes itself do not. This way you can always tell what is ours and what is theirs.

For example, if you select Decision, only the orders and ruling will appear.

Two things to get ahead of

First: Ten commissions, including FERC, don’t publicly file metadata at all. No metadata means nothing for our crawler to grab, which means filtering any of them to a category returns a clear, confident zero. The full list:

• Arkansas Public Service Commission
• Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority
• Georgia Public Service Commission
• New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission
• Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission
• South Dakota Public Utilities Commission
• Tennessee Public Utility Commission
• Utah Public Service Commission
• Virginia State Corporation Commission
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Second: We don’t guess. Halcyon intentionally doesn’t invent categories for documents that the commission didn’t label. We show you what is actually there, not what we hope is there. Metadata-thin commissions like Alabama or Texas categorize many different filings types under “Filings,” “Document,” “Supplemental Filing,” “other,” or similar miscellaneous categories. When searching the Texas PUC, for example, filtering to Decision returns nothing, because Texas files recommended decisions under a catch-all “Pleadings” type.

But, the PUCT does have a filing type that perfectly corresponds to Halcyon’s Tariff filing type, so documents do appear when filtering to that category.

The takeaway saves you real grief: run a quick test search before you create an alert based on filing types. Five seconds confirming a category actually returns documents can save you some headache down the road.

One more note — we don't yet have filing type categories for ISO/RTOs or air quality agencies.

View the full menu

There are 19 categories in all — Decisions, Stipulation, Compliance, Testimony and Exhibits, Intervention, and more — each with its own definition and a few “this counts, that doesn’t” edge cases worth knowing before you begin. Rather than reprint the whole rulebook here, we keep a living reference that stays current as the categories evolve.

See every filing type category and what it includes

Shrink the pile

The regulatory record rewards people who narrow before they search. Filtering a filing type category turns thousands of documents into the handful that matter, lines up across states, and accelerates your time to value.

Try it on your next search. Sign into Halcyon, navigate to Search, and find your right Filing type.