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sniggings

anyone know if Sainsburys send out emails monthly requesting meter reading?

WattNext

sniggings wrote: »

anyone know if Sainsburys send out emails monthly requesting meter reading?

I believe they bill by calendar quarter: Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun and so on. At least one of the smaller suppliers asks at contract onset for a months direct debit payment up front and then they ask for monthly meter readings.

Any up front payment plays havoc with British Gas and SSE billing systems. Either it will cancel the direct debit or it will in the case of British Gas cause the online transaction history to erroneously preload with that payment so that you always appear to have more credit than you really have.

Sainsbury also apply to the bank for the direct debit payment 10 days prior to the due date. This is the excuse they use to explain the extra credit.

CheskaBB

Had an awful experience with Sainsburys Energy. Switched via the Cheap Energy Club deal in Jan & my gas has only just gone through after 6 months.
They eventually transferred in May without telling me, started taking money from my account without telling me & never supplied a final meter reading to my old supplier so I've been paying 2 companies.
I've calculated that I've had to pay my old supplier about £24 more for their gas & have ended up accepting £30 compensation due to the threatening "take it or leave it" tone of the emails from their complaints department.
I regularly switch my utilities & accept that things go wrong but due to their unhelpful attitude would NEVER USE SAINSBURYS ENERGY ever again!

WattNext

Not good at all! The problem British Gas have is that their telephone help advisers cannot rely on their own screens so they have to rely on the actual billing statement and if that contains errors then nobody wins except British Gas if the error favours them.

How did it all go wrong for so many suppliers?

You have to hark back to the time when British Gas were the only gas supplier. The new big six retail suppliers modeled their computer systems on the British Gas one which was flawed. Instantly its as though everybody caught a computer virus.

Centrica manage the computer system for British Gas and for a variety of legacy reasons their systems are badly degraded and I suspect they are somehow involved with the big six dragging their own systems into disrepute. The problems are absolutely huge!

Avoiding British Gas does not necessarily mean you are problem free unless your supplier is free of Centrica which is unlikely.

bobbyl

I thought my switch was finally sorted after many months of problems although SE never managed to put my gas and electricity into one account and one direct debit. Since I was getting the dual fuel rate, I didn't pursue this. However, recently I checked my Experian account and found that my credit score had dropped from excellent to fair because of SE's policies and errors. My score went down because I have two credit applications and two credit accounts from SE. I could not see why they had to do even a credit search as I have a long-standing direct debit account with BG for something else. And why would paying SE by direct debit require credit applications and accounts in any case? It emerged that I had duplicate searches/applications/accounts because SE set up my electricity in Feb but only managed to do the gas part of the account in May, and then did the searches again despite my having by then an on-going account with them. When I raised this with SE, they said they would get the duplicate search removed from my Experian account. A couple of weeks later I learned that request had been sent to the wrong department in SE so I was back to square one. My complaint handler has now said the credit department can't see any additional search on my file but will pursue this. Having been given three different responses to my query about the need for a search in the first place if I have an established BG account, the complaint handler has now told me that she has seen some cases like this where sometimes SE does a search and sometimes they don't. I have stressed to SE that the drop in my credit score is crucial for me in terms of making an application for a loan. The complaint handler is going to ring me in two weeks for an up-date. And SE thinks they might just be able to put my electricity and gas accounts into one now. They say they couldn't do so previously because one account had my flat number and one didn't. I had given them the correct address many times. Utter shambles- but now not just massive inconvenience and annoyance but also significant impact on credit rating.

WattNext

Just a point about your Experian credit score. As far as I know the only way to obtain that score is through an online subscription of about £15 per month. This provides alerts to your credit status and is particularly useful if identity theft is an issue. The searches you mention would have raised an alert making your aware much earlier of what was happening. You can peek your details by paying £2 but it will not include your credit score. So just how did you obtain that score?

As for British Gas and SE they have three call centres. Billing is located in South Africa however both their Cardiff and Yorkshire call centres will pass themselves off as billing. Each contact with them creates a complaint beginning with the number 8. They will not voluntarily give you this number. By doing so they avoid continuity and accountability.

The consequence is that contact can come from any of the three call centres and you would not necessarily know which one. Even when you have the complaint number you will not have continuity because the customer call mechanism will pass you through again to any of the three call centre. By doing it this way a different person unfamiliar with your case will handle your call. They have access to screen notes on the issue but if these are somewhat lengthy then its unlikely things will move forward.

You need to get that complaint number and quote it each time you contact them. Things are so bad in terms of continuity that the complaint will often stretch to 56 calendar days allowing you to register the complaint with the Ombudsman Energy Service.

bobbyl

I took the advice of MSE and signed up for a 30 day free trial with Experian which gave me access to my credit report.

If you tell SE that you wish to make a complaint, you are given a named complaint handler, a phone number for them, and a reference number. There are plenty of things I dislike about SE, but the complaint handlers have always rung me when they said they would and done what they had agreed to do.

SWone

Changed to Sainsburys Fix feb 2015, expires Feb 2016.
First Bill, they are Charging MORE than Contract Values
Contract
Gas 3.28 per kWh
Elec 9.29 per kWh
Standing Charge 26.00 p per day
for EACH product
Sainsburys is actually charging
Gas 3.2865 per kWh,
Elec 9.2925 per kWH
Standing charge 26.0085 per day for EACH product.
This means 200,000 of Sainsburys energy Customers are ALSO being overcharged!
And I am sure that this applies to the MILLIONS of British Gas Customers.
I am taking this to Ofgem
SWone

WattNext

SWone wrote: »

I am taking this to Ofgem

Good luck with that. The 'm' in Ofgem stands for 'markets' so they operate at a very high level. The level that you or I operate at is Ombudsman:Energy level so Ofgem will refer you to them and quite rightly so.

Calculating you own bill is fraught especially Gas. The kWh figure must take account of the Calorific Value of gas for the period in question. All suppliers are advised of the CV by National Grid.

Sainsbury always tell you in their statement what CV value was used. What they tend to do though is ignore the actual reading you submitted and use an estimated reading instead and will deny any knowledge of you sending the actual reading. This applies to both gas and lec.

The next trap is VAT set at 5%. The rates quoted by MSE include VAT so to extract the net value you have to divide by the VAT fraction which in this case is 21.

I'm with another supplier but I have access to some real bills from Sainsbury. They bill by calendar quarter and break down the bill into three chunks probably because the CV is updated monthly. At the top of the gas bill is a message "Your 0.3p /kWh Direct Debit discount has already been applied to your unit rates" and for lec the message is "Your 0.89p /kWh Direct Debit discount has already been applied to your unit rates".

Having declared this and somewhat bizarrely the first part of the gas statement calculates using £0.0347/kWh which further down is reduced to £0.0317/kWh. Similarly on the lec statement they begin with £0.944/kWh which further down reduces to £0.0855/kWh.

The standing order is more straight forward. On the statement it uses £0.2000/day net of VAT. The statement values above are also net of VAT.

At the bottom of the bill, all of these net of VAT charges are added up and VAT on this at 5% is calculated. Both are added up and you have what is in credit or debit (what you owe them).

A thing to bear in mind is that what you see when you have logged into your online account is not the same as what the adviser is seeing. For them to see what you are seeing they must go to their technical web team and obtain a temporary password so that they can log into your account. The screens they are using are not reliable so they pull up the PDF copy of your bill.

This is a trap for the unwary you are seeing something quite different to the adviser and immediately you are both at loggerheads. The real killer is when they make a corrective adjustment this is not broken down on the bill but appears as an unaccountable lump which is another source of discontent for the customer.

intalex

It's Deja vu at the new flat where I had made a decision to carry over my Sainsbury's contract (this was before me experience described in my earlier post below), to take over from existing supplier Scottish Power.

This time the transfer readings I provided to Sainsbury's never made it to Scottish Power, who issued me with final bills based on estimate meter readings much higher than the actual transfer readings.

Sainsbury's claim to have contacted Scottish Power and apparently convinced them to re-issue final bills based on my actual transfer meter readings a couple of weeks ago, and Sainsbury's themselves have started my account using the actual meter readings (clearly so they don't lose out in any way).

I have seen no evidence of Scottish Power issuing revised final bills so far, and as things stand I am being double-billed for considerable units, with no control or guarantees that Scottish Power have truly accepted the actual readings and will issue revised final bills to avoid the double-billing.

Surely someone has to take responsibility for this repeated mess, which in both cases has been blamed on "the switching system" by Sainsbury's.

How long do I wait for this mess to clear up, and if it doesn't, who should I take this up with?

intalex wrote: »

In my switch from First Utility to Sainsbury's, I had submitted both gas and electricity actual open reads around the transfer date (well within the reading submission window), and only the electricity one was accepted with the gas one ignored in favour of an estimate.

Sainsbury's claim the "industry database" decided to calculate and use an estimate over the actual reading, and that they had no control over enforcing the actual reading. They tried to re-submit the actual reading on my request but this time First Utility rejected it as it was within some acceptable industry tolerance of the estimate that was used.

My guess around the presence of such a tolerance is for utility companies to not get into a scrap over billable units below the tolerance level. Normally I wouldn't care who gets to bill me a few units here and there as long as I'm billed only once.

However, with this situation I happened to move flats soon after the switch and my close read when I moved out was even lower than the estimate open read that Sainsbury's had used during the switch, which their systems simply would not be able to handle in terms of generating a final bill (negative consumption).

So what they have done is to use the estimate open read that was used during the switch, and added to it the actual consumption (based on actual transfer/open and close reads I provided) to estimate my close read and generate my final bill, so they have billed me my full consumption for the time I was with them.

They have made it my problem (or bad luck) that I was effectively double-charged and over-charged by First Utility on the basis of an incorrect estimate read being used during the transfer.

The excess charge is only ~£10, but just can't believe or accept that such a loophole exists which puts the customer out of pocket. I'm also highly sceptical about Sainsbury's disowning the problem, even more so after reading the feedback on here.

I guess the bottom line questions are for my situation are:-
1. Does this industry database have a mind of its own where it would reject actual readings in favour of its own estimates?
2. Does the industry process allow refusal of re-instating the actual reading if the estimate is clearly proven to be incorrect and causing an over-charge, even if it's within a published tolerance?

Thanks for reading, and for any comments/answers.