Npower billing system glitch in customers favour

Inigo_Montoya

Twice now I have had a glitch in my npower bills in my favour - due to my individual circumstances I have only gained by about £20 to £30 IIRC but potentially its possible to have a bill for £100s less than it should be

In summary what has happened is that the start date of the latest
bill does not match the end date of the previous bill and the start read of the latest bill does not match the end read of the previous bill

Instead the start date of the latest bill in two instances has been the date of the last customer read I have given & the start read is also this customer read which is potentially a huge problem wrt lost revenue for npower if it is happening a lot

I have no idea if this is just me or if it might be more widespread

if this is a widespread glitch then the way to take advantage of it should you wish to try to do so is to ensure you give lots of customers read *just before* your bill is generated as they may then only bill you for a few days + units rather than for the full 6 months

Of course npower may figure out this is happening & rebill everybody affected at some point so dont spend any 'savings' made

I have actually just transferred away from Npower so am unable to make any use of this glitch myself

undercover_peon

Sadly it will be picked up randomly at some point. I don't entirely understand it myself but basically the (superb, flawless, without parallel) billing system has a missing billing order.

It, or a person, will notice and swing into action, and then some hapless employee will have to try to explain

"You see Mr customer when we billed you in March we only billed from February to March, not December to March as we should have. W have now billed you for the missing period.

Yes that's right the balance from the previous bill is ummm carried forward, even though it covered a later period :-O"

You can imagine how that goes...

DragonQ

Dates seem to be a bit problematic with energy providers. This wasn't nPower but when I had to submit meter readings during my last switch, I was given a range of about a week. I submitted a meter reading from the first day of that range, but for some reason they marked it down as coming from the last day of that range. This meant that their direct debit estimate was too high because what they had down as 2 weeks' worth of usage was actually 3 weeks' worth of usage.

Seems pointless to give a range of dates and then not adhere to which date was chosen. Fortunately they agreed that their calculations were wrong and changed the direct debit.