Symbio Energy - check your bills vs direct debits

Talldave

Streaky_Bacon said:

Talldave said:

Many months ago there was a poster who was convinced he was being ripped off by Symbio. I put his figures into my Symbio checking Excel spreadsheet and proved he wasn't.  I think you might have missed out the monthly consolidation process?

@Talldave

No, this isn't a consolidation issue.

Would you agree that, if I:

1) Take Symbio's estimated Oct 31st reading from the October bill, subtract the validated opening reading and then multiple that by the unit price

2) Take the number of days from the first day of the contract until Oct 31st, and multiple that by the standing charge

3) Add up all of the DD payments that have been taken, up to and including the payment taken at the start of Oct

then 1) + 2) should equal 3)

?

In my case they don't. They are out by about £50.

No, not if, like me, you've had any negative bills.  And you've omitted VAT from your calculation?

Other points to consider: 

It took Symbio 9 months to actually charge me the standing charge and unit rate I signed up to.

If you've been with them more than 12 months, then you'll probably have changes to the standing charge and unit rate to consider.

If you were a customer prior to April 2020 and gave them meter readings a day late, you'd have been getting free units.

However, a £50 difference for me would be about a whole month's payment different, so it's unlikely that any of those small variations I mention above would account for such a large difference.

If you look at each bill from Symbio, are all the figures correct? You should be able to map each bill to a direct debit payment.

Streaky_Bacon

Talldave

I haven't gone through all of the calculations on each bill, but each bill does map to a direct debit payment. There is no discrepancy between the amounts on the bills and the DDs that have been taken. All the amounts are correct and they haven't taken a DD twice or anything like that.

I have not made a mistake in terms of understanding how it should be calculated (including making sure that VAT is included). In my first post I laid out how I had calculated it.

I may possibly have miscalculated something, but I have not made a mistake in my understanding of how it has been calculated.

So, either my calculation is wrong, of their calculation has gone wrong somewhere.

I'm not going to try to figure out what mistake they may have made. I'm just going to wait until the final bill, Then, if I still think it's wrong I am going to say "I used X kWh over X days, which should be £X. You have charged me £Y, so I need the difference back".

If they can explain how they arrived at £Y rather than £X, then fair enough.

I understand that there may be an assumption that I have made a mistake. I'm pretty sure that I haven't.

However, the main thrust of my post is to say that I believe that Symbio have made a mistake, and that it might not be a bad idea for other customer just to spend a few minutes doing a sanity check of usage vs billed amounts/DDs.

Talldave

Fair point. I'm not a great fan of Symbio, but they're often accused of stuff they haven't actually done.

The problem with their bills is that you need a PhD in maths to understand them! I certainly couldn't do it without having built an Excel spreadsheet that cross checks actual use against their wild estimate & consolidate approach.  In my case, once the ludicrous estimates, incorrect pricing, free units and rounding errors are taken into account,  it all adds up.

wwally

I've just managed to balance my first year to within £2. It took some doing. I had a discrepancy that was explained by a bill that was issued but the DD was never taken, and a bill that I received but never found its way into my online account! Also in the early days they billed at the wrong tariff, and never recovered the difference.

Snudz

Talldave said:

Fair point. I'm not a great fan of Symbio, but they're often accused of stuff they haven't actually done.

The problem with their bills is that you need a PhD in maths to understand them! I certainly couldn't do it without having built an Excel spreadsheet that cross checks actual use against their wild estimate & consolidate approach.  In my case, once the ludicrous estimates, incorrect pricing, free units and rounding errors are taken into account,  it all adds up.

Had to smile when I read this.
In my complaint to the Ombudsman I pointed out the over complicated bills suggesting the software producing the bills must have been written by someone fresh out of college trying to show off.   I further stated that I would say you need a Maths degree to decipher/understand them.  Followed by stating I do have a Maths degree and unfortunately I still struggled to decipher the bills.

devondiver

Talldave said:

Fair point. I'm not a great fan of Symbio, but they're often accused of stuff they haven't actually done.

The problem with their bills is that you need a PhD in maths to understand them! I certainly couldn't do it without having built an Excel spreadsheet that cross checks actual use against their wild estimate & consolidate approach.  In my case, once the ludicrous estimates, incorrect pricing, free units and rounding errors are taken into account,  it all adds up.

I don't have a maths degree (although I do hold a couple of others ) but I can well understand why SE, with their crazy billing system and pitiful CS, attract so many negative comments (some, predictably, unjustified) - largely as a result of loss of trust.

Perhaps, like mine, the OP's miscalculations (by SE) stem back to the early part of the year when flaws in their billing system became apparent, coupled with SE's belated realisation that they would soon be seriously in arrears unless they changed to a 'winter months/summer months' forward estimation system .

Anyone who, like me and others, gave meter readings other than on the final day of the month uncovered a flaw in their system which meant that, in some instances, the wrong readings were used for their calculations. These errors then became either positive or negative credits being assigned to accounts, resulting in some customers being winners, and others losers.

Like many others I am savvy enough to follow my electricity usage on a tailored Excel spreadsheet but I drew the line at trying to incorporate SE's unnecessarily complex 'Variance Charges' and 'Reconciled Variance Units Consumption', especially for an Economy 7 usage such as mine. (Did you actually do this Talldave?).

So, unless all SE employees are maths grads (doubtful) the errors thrown up by their system and consolidated into customer accounts either went unnoticed or were irreconcilable, by either them or their customers alike.

SE's fallback position then becomes the 'final consolidation' using initial sign-up reading/s and final switching readings which should, in theory, resolve all discrepancies along the way. However, the growing 'loss of trust' amongst many customers then makes them understandably suspicious of SE's consolidation figures - especially given the background of errors plus the groundswell of opinion that SE are about to hit the buffers (as evidenced by their very public failure to pay their Ofgem dues).

My answer to this was simply to cancel my DD in good time and then pay them only what I calculate to be due. If they dispute that then let them prove it and try to reclaim it.

Unfortunately now, as a knock-on from their over-clever charging system (and general incompetence), they must spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with complaints and trying to correct past errors. For example I have today, at last, received a detailed and apologetic reply to my email of 3 weeks ago which has in the meantime been superceded by 2 further emails from me, my paying them everything due and my switching my account to PFP which is, incidentally, slightly cheaper. Just waiting now for my eventual consolidation which I expect to be close to zero.

brewerdave

Streaky_Bacon said:

matelodave said:I decided that the most accurate way was to work out what I'd used - initial meter read from final meter read, work out the number of days (note I got shoved onto a different tariff for the last month so I've taken the different s/c and kwh rate into account). Do the sums to work out how much it should have cost overall (without faffing around with all the random bills and estimates etc) and then subtract it from what they actually took in DD's

That's it. Cutting through all the billing gymnastics, by deducting the opening from the closing and figuring out how much should have been billed and how much should have been taken.

It's something that we should all do, now and again. To pick up any discrepancies.

It's clearer when there is a closing reading, but can be done before as long as you have a kWh figure that has actually been used to calculate your most recent bill.

My spreadsheets calculate a running (contract) balance AND an individual (monthly) bill balance. Started doing that a few years ago ,when one of the Companies supplying me at that time, removed already published bills from their portal, and recalculated back to an arbitrary date !!

Streaky_Bacon

devondiver said:

Perhaps, like mine, the OP's miscalculations (by SE) stem back to the early part of the year when flaws in their billing system became apparent, coupled with SE's belated realisation that they would soon be seriously in arrears unless they changed to a 'winter months/summer months' forward estimation system .

I suspect that you may be right. Although I said that I wasn't going to delve into it, to figure out their mistake, I did look again last night and noticed a discrepancy between the bills and online figure, around the time I complained about a bill with a massive overestimate, and they altered the bill.

The bill matches the direct debit that was taken, but not the amount on the line item on the online payments screen. When I click on the line item, it gives the correct figure as per the DD. The figures for the next two months are correct on the line item, but when I click on them they give the same figure as the first incorrect line item.

Whether that is a website glitch or a billing glitch, or both, it certainly makes me think that they may have gotten their billing knickers in a twist around that time.

I am now going to stick to my guns and not waste anymore time on their billing, and let them sort it out.

Talldave

devondiver said:

Like many others I am savvy enough to follow my electricity usage on a tailored Excel spreadsheet but I drew the line at trying to incorporate SE's unnecessarily complex 'Variance Charges' and 'Reconciled Variance Units Consumption', especially for an Economy 7 usage such as mine. (Did you actually do this Talldave?).

My own usage is non-E7, but the forum member I helped in the past was on E7, so I had to create an E7 version for him.

I'm baffled by why Symbio created such a nightmare system. Their working practices are terrible, a prime example being how bill templates would suddenly revert to spelling errors that had previously been fixed.

They're also downright thick. When you've been with them a year they know your consumption, so there is no need for random estimates. The EAC from my tariff renewal was sensible, but once I chose the tariff, they ignore that EAC and go back to the one from a year ago. Last November I used 500kWh, but they've estimated 700kWh - the reality will be around 400kWh thanks to LED bulbs that have reduced consumption every month, which they know.

I've submitted a complaint that they're not sticking to the payment schedule they offered me at renewal; using instead their ludicrous estimates instead - despite consumption being below EAC month on month. They've not responded so it'll be Ombudsman in 6 weeks time. It'll be interesting to hear their explanation for why they offered me a payment schedule they obviously have no intention of following. 

devondiver

Streaky_Bacon said:

I am now going to stick to my guns and not waste anymore time on their billing, and let them sort it out.

I think that's the best approach. Their website/customer portal figures are a joke. Life's too short to try to unravel their programming errors for them. Even if you could they wouldn't understand (I think Talldave has offered more than once).