Ovo, taking my credit balance

pseudodox

Good old double entry bookkeeping.  Presumably the energy companies receive payments from government by submitting a claim for X number of customers.  Money is credited into company accounts.  Then they debit it to all eligible customers.  This becomes a credit on the customer account.  Each customer then has a debit of either a refund to their bank or a reduction in payment of money for energy consumed.

The confusion is arising due to the different ways companies are debiting customers.  But the company will have to balance their books to show that all government monies allowed for the scheme are seen going in & out of their own accounts.  The government does not have records of which members of the public are eligible to receive the £400 support so it must be distributed through the energy suppliers.  The suppliers are being tasked with a lot of extra work which will have necessitated changes to their accounting software, but only on a short term basis.  As a former accounts administrator I am glad I am retired!

ffc58

Although never entirely happy with OVO.
I have always been impressed by My OVO.
Which is very detailed and gives comparison on usage etc going back 5 years.
Also find the way they are applying the grant to be very easy to follow.
Plus  i can get 5% credit back on my bills as keep my credit balance high. 

Rosieglow_3

Hi @ovosucks for what it's worth I agree with you as the same looks to be happening to my account. I won't bore you but after a major balls up by ovo my account ended up nearly £1500 in credit in August. Since then the support scheme has come into play and I agree that the amount seems to be being taken from my credit balance and it does appear to be a double accounting of the -£67. Below are screenshot from the app form nov-dec

ariarnia

Rosieglow_3 said:

Since then the support scheme has come into play and I agree that the amount seems to be being taken from my credit balance and it does appear to be a double accounting of the -£67. Below are screenshot from the app form nov-dec

thats not double counting.

the minus 66 in your first image is 66 from your dd being refunded to your bank. 

the minus 66 in the second image is ovo taking 66 from your bill. 

so it works out that you pay 66 less for your bill and have the money back to your account. as it should be. 

[Deleted User]

ariarnia said:

Rosieglow_3 said:

Since then the support scheme has come into play and I agree that the amount seems to be being taken from my credit balance and it does appear to be a double accounting of the -£67. Below are screenshot from the app form nov-dec

thats not double counting.

the minus 66 in your first image is 66 from your dd being refunded to your bank. 

the minus 66 in the second image is ovo taking 66 from your bill. 

so it works out that you pay 66 less for your bill and have the money back to your account. as it should be. 

I return to a post that I made a few days ago. The immediate reaction these days when consumers get an energy bill that they don’t understand is that the supplier must be doing something underhand; it’s a scam or even fraud. As you have again demonstrated, the supplier has done nothing wrong and a one minute check of a bank statement would have revealed that money had indeed been credited to the consumer’s bank account.

I accept that there is always an argument for greater clarity but the statement looks pretty clear to me.

pochase

The £67/£66 are something the billing system were not prepared for, nobody has assumed this scenario.

So the systems are just patched for 6 months to somehow deal with it. And the systems are not patched in an user friendly way, just so that the supplier can deal with it. The payments are only for a limited time (6 months), so no supplier is going to spend a lot of money or effort to make it good looking and easy understandable.

As @[Deleted User] says the problem is that users just look at the bill and if they don't immediately see what the supplier has done, they don't check the bill and/or their bank account.

badmemory

I find it easier to do my own version of the bill before I look at BGs because I thought the same until I realised the final answer was the same.  They all seem to be designed to be as complicated as possible.  My conspiracy theory on this is so that we don't know what is going on - keep us ignorant.  BG seem to no longer mark an estimated reading as an estimated reading, they just don't mark it as a customer reading.  A little sneaky in my opinion.