Why do Energy Cos Seem Unable To Produce Accurate Bills Consistently??

400ixl

Ofgem data says less than 2% of customers make a complaint against their supplier and over 50% were resolved by the next working day. Of those complaints 23% was the highest a supplier had from billing. So 0.5% billing complaints.

Had some bill mix ups when transferring as a SOLR but soon sorted via online chat. Other than that submitting monthly readings and being able to self calculate what that means tends to keep it all under control.

Spoonie_Turtle

born_again said:

GunJack said:

Possibly me just having a rant, but from personal experience and many threads on this board it seems that pretty much every energy retailer that's left in business can't do this on a consistent basis...surely their systems should be robust enough for this not to happen? Any ideas anyone??

Simple answer. Read meters each month. Provide reading.
Jobs a good one.

Well in theory, yes, in reality, maybe not - there's a thread running at the moment where the customer provides readings every month and their supplier still uses estimates.

There have also been threads where the supplier uses estimates for billing despite pulling reads from the smart meter that show up on the account!

[Deleted User]

It is fair comment to say that many people believe that suppliers are blessed with physic powers. How often do people post: I have cut my consumption by 20%; I had PV solar panels fitted in September etc? As others have posted, the key to accurate billing is actual meter readings provided by a meter reader; a customer or a smart meter.

GunJack

My beef is that, even when you religiously read the meters and submit them on-time, they still c*ck it up!!! 

Oh, and manage to calculate, from the use of 134 cubic metres of gas, an almost NEGATIVE £300 charge (i.e. a CREDIT) on your bill   

Raxiel

I've had genuinely inaccurate bills in the past. When I was with Iresa (anyone else remember them?) they used a fixed calorific value for the gas instead of taking a truncated average of the daily CV values from the network.

In practice the error only amounted to a few pence in each bill period, but technically it was there.

Besides them I've only been with E.On 'classic' and Octopus who have both managed to give me accurate bills. Although Octopus' algorithm continues to be confused by my precipitous reduction in usage following energy saving improvements and continues to overestimate my projected usage. At least that's trending in the right direction and they allow me to manually set a more appropriate direct debit rather than doing it by diktat.

GhibliFan

I've been trying to get an accurate final bill since last June from Eon-next. They are the worst company I've ever had to deal with in my life. 

BooJewels

I have religiously given meter readings monthly and calculated my own bill for several years now (as a check against what I'm actually billed), so am perfectly comfortable with how to calculate energy use and what it should cost.

But British Gas have seemingly lost the plot recently - since the advent of their new system.  I've not actually had an inaccurate bill, but have had ones that are unfathomable at first glance and take some unravelling.  I have my own gas with them and am also managing an estate property for gas and electricity with them.  The estate property has smart meters that have gone dumb and trying to submit manual reads is proving almost impossible, I perpetually get an "Oops, something went wrong" message - then they have the audacity to send me an email asking to rate my experience of giving said failed meter reading.  The single occasion where I did manage to get one submitted, because it was 41kWh lower than their recent estimate, they have assumed the customer has gone round the clock and their usage on the account shows as 99959kWh for that month.  I  hoping that they'd try billing for £34k, but whilst the bill came through properly (ignoring this intermediate reading), it still shows on the account.

The final account I got for the deceased's account was actually accurate to the bottom line - but I only confirmed this by working it out totally differently myself - the bill itself made no sense whatsoever.  They billed use from October, but with an opening credit that appeared on a January bill and the difference between them was accounted for in the sums, but not actually mentioned anywhere - so the sums, as on the page, didn't work.  All very strange.

With the current energy situation, when people are especially worried about energy costs and monitoring expenditure very closely, you would think that companies would have a responsibility to present such matters to their customers in a manner that they could actually have confidence in being correct and accurate - and be able to understand them.  When they do convoluted workings out, it's no wonder you can never get through on the phone, so many people must be totally bamboozled.  They don't even include the gas calculations on the bills any more!

Octopus seem to manage it really well, as others have cited - it feels like a blot on my copybook if there's 2p difference between my calculation and the bill that arrives a few hours later.

JohnB47

I've always had accurate bills and likewise with Octopus now.

The Octopus bills differ from my own calculations only because they use a gas calorific value to a number of decimal places but quote that value to only one decimal place on the bills.

So it's impossible for me to get my calculation to match theirs. Still, the difference is only a penny or two usually.

markin

400ixl said:

Ofgem data says less than 2% of customers make a complaint against their supplier and over 50% were resolved by the next working day. Of those complaints 23% was the highest a supplier had from billing. So 0.5% billing complaints.

Had some bill mix ups when transferring as a SOLR but soon sorted via online chat. Other than that submitting monthly readings and being able to self calculate what that means tends to keep it all under control.

Would that only be the elevated complaints that end up at the ombudsman?

For every minor problem we see on the forum the must be far more that are missed by the customer or that are fix after a call or email.

When we see the same problem from the same provider for months, years, It means they don't have a process to fix the problem internally automatically, And so its eating up customer service time and being fixed manually over and over.

Raxiel

JohnB47 said:

I've always had accurate bills and likewise with Octopus now.

The Octopus bills differ from my own calculations only because they use a gas calorific value to a number of decimal places but quote that value to only one decimal place on the bills.

So it's impossible for me to get my calculation to match theirs. Still, the difference is only a penny or two usually.

Strictly speaking, If that's what they're doing they shouldn't be.

According to the Gas Regs 1996 3(2), "The average calorific value of gas so conveyed during any such gas period shall be calculated by adding the daily calorific values calculated in accordance with regulation 4 below for each gas day in that gas period and dividing the sum by the number of those gas days but so that any amount of less than 0.1 megajoules per cubic metre shall be ignored. "

So, mean Average of the figures from National Grid, truncated (effectively always rounded down) to one decimal place.

Only a small error as you say, but Id be surprised that Octopus of all companies would make it. I must admit though, I've not looked up the actual CV values from national grid to check my bill since my Iresa days.