EDF Credit Balance Issue

Gerry1

I'm sure I had monthly billing when I was with EDF not all that long ago, I'd never have agreed to quarterly or six-monthly billing.

Probably a bit like BG (at least on their old system), they may default to six-monthly but will agree to monthly if you make a fuss.

matt_drummer

It sounds like a poorly designed system that only took account of the circumstances of the time.

I would imagine that the designers would not have expected the system to still be in use 25 to 30 years later.

Can any of us imagine using 30 year old technology today? (I am excepting some non smart meter users from this on the basis of it it aint broke don't fix it!)

molerat

matt_drummer said:

molerat said:

MattMattMattUK said:

I would say that they have not chosen to, they have discovered that it is just not possible with their billing system, which is very old, from what I have read online it seems to date from the mid to late nineties, it is based on very old technology, it is very inflexible and is largely based around the idea of a meter reader submitting a reading as they used to do when they visited houses on a periodic basis. At the moment there is a collection of systems that manage billing, more that lead to accounting, various data feeds and plug-ins that have to write in smart reads, as well as a corporate accounting system (probably something SAP?) and then there is the smart meter data side of thigs that is visible in the app and website, but which is not actually part of the billing system.

So how come it used to produce monthly bills when I was with them in 2017, submit a read at >28 days and a bill would be produced.

I don't think they have a problem with producing bills.

I think their problem is that their system then wants to collect the money based on the frequency of billing.

With a monthly bill they want to collect in a month.

With a six monthly bill they want to collect over six months.

You would have thought it was a simple fix but it probably isn't.

But back then they didn't want to collect money on billing, they ran the as expected budget direct debit system without any problems.

matt_drummer

molerat said:

But back then they didn't want to collect money on billing, they ran the as expected budget direct debit system without any problems.

Then maybe I am right, they can do it but choose not to for some reason?

MattMattMattUK

matt_drummer said:

MattMattMattUK said:

matt_drummer said:

MattMattMattUK said:

matt_drummer said:

MattMattMattUK said:

Alnat1 said:

If you would prefer monthly bills, move to a company that does them.

I recommend Octopus for monthly bills that are easy to read and support staff you can easily contact if to have a query.

EDF will offer monthly bills if one is happy with variable Direct Debit. 

That being said I also think Octopus are the better bet. 

This is what I don't understand about companies that bill six monthly.

They obviously can produce monthly bills.

Saying they can't is untrue.

If they can produce monthly bills, why is it dependent on the bill being settled in full?

I can only assume it is a choice they make, nothing is stopping them producing a bill each month, accepting a customers `fixed' monthly direct debit and adjusting the customer's balance accordingly.

For me it is completely unacceptable that they continue to provide their customers with very misleading information.

As it currently stands their billing software cannot process it, that is the reason. If there is a debt it attempts to recover that over the next billing cycle, if that cycle is one month it wants payment in full because there is only one month for it to recover the debt in.

If/when their new billing software comes online at some point in the Q4 2023-Q4 2024 window that might change. 

I can see that they cannot make it work.

I'm an accountant, this is not that difficult, it's simple debits and credits, it's just a sales ledger that most businesses operate, basic accounting.

They can produce monthly bills, it's obviously true that they can.

Their problem is that their system expects the bill to be paid for in full, the problem is not producing a monthly bill.

Tell it not to attempt to recover the bill and deduct it from the customers balance instead.

I know I am over simplifying it, but they have had years and years to work on this, and they chose not to.

I would say that they have not chosen to, they have discovered that it is just not possible with their billing system, which is very old, from what I have read online it seems to date from the mid to late nineties, it is based on very old technology, it is very inflexible and is largely based around the idea of a meter reader submitting a reading as they used to do when they visited houses on a periodic basis. At the moment there is a collection of systems that manage billing, more that lead to accounting, various data feeds and plug-ins that have to write in smart reads, as well as a corporate accounting system (probably something SAP?) and then there is the smart meter data side of thigs that is visible in the app and website, but which is not actually part of the billing system. 

It appears they made the decision to upgrade their systems in 2015-2017, looked at options, developing their software etc. and found they were going to need to start from scratch, in the end they ended up licensing Kraken from Octopus in 2021 and will finally get to the deployment stage in 2023-2024 if all goes well.

matt_drummer said:

It's rubbish and the proof of that is the number of people who think they are owed money when they aren't.

I agree it is not the clearest, it is far from ideal, but I would also say it is hardly rocket science. 

matt_drummer said:

Thinking about it a bit more.

If they have a process they can carry out every six months with no issue, all they need to do is do it more often.

If their software can debit a customers account with a bill every six months, there is absolutely no reason why they can't carry out the same process more frequently.

I don't believe the problem is their software can't do it, it already does. They just choose not to do it as regularly as I think is necessary.

It can process the bill every month, but that also ties in with the Direct Debit collection and debt recovery part of the software, which attempts to recover the amount owed over the next billing cycle. There would be manual options if they had a few thousand customers, but they have 5.4 million, it needs to be automated. 

OK, thanks.

Maybe I can see an issue, they have linked direct debits to billing cycles.


It would appear that they have invested little in more than twenty five years on their billing system.

Pretty rubbish if you ask me, I cannot imagine using software from the nineties to produce accounts now. I'm not sure it would even work!

My understanding and I am happy to be corrected, but huge parts of anything SAP (I think, having to use Ariba for dealing with some customers it seems the architecture appears archaic, with a pretty skin on top) and Sage (which when I last used it nine years ago still used a flat file system designed to run on tapes), most banking systems, many of which are written on variants of Fortran/Cobol which were originally designed for punch cards, some are even still written in assembly language and with emulators pretending to be legacy hardware to facilitate an interface with other systems. 

QrizB

MattMattMattUK said:

matt_drummer said:

Pretty rubbish if you ask me, I cannot imagine using software from the nineties to produce accounts now. I'm not sure it would even work!

My understanding and I am happy to be corrected, but huge parts of anything SAP (I think, having to use Ariba for dealing with some customers it seems the architecture appears archaic, with a pretty skin on top) and Sage (which when I last used it nine years ago still used a flat file system designed to run on tapes), most banking systems, many of which are written on variants of Fortran/Cobol which were originally designed for punch cards, some are even still written in assembly language and with emulators pretending to be legacy hardware to facilitate an interface with other systems. 

From what various insiders have said over on the pensions forum, the big financial companies are in an even worse position. Fortunately pensioners are time-limited and with luck the demand for the software will cease before it falls over catastrophically.

matt_drummer

MattMattMattUK said:

matt_drummer said:

MattMattMattUK said:

matt_drummer said:

MattMattMattUK said:

matt_drummer said:

MattMattMattUK said:

Alnat1 said:

If you would prefer monthly bills, move to a company that does them.

I recommend Octopus for monthly bills that are easy to read and support staff you can easily contact if to have a query.

EDF will offer monthly bills if one is happy with variable Direct Debit. 

That being said I also think Octopus are the better bet. 

This is what I don't understand about companies that bill six monthly.

They obviously can produce monthly bills.

Saying they can't is untrue.

If they can produce monthly bills, why is it dependent on the bill being settled in full?

I can only assume it is a choice they make, nothing is stopping them producing a bill each month, accepting a customers `fixed' monthly direct debit and adjusting the customer's balance accordingly.

For me it is completely unacceptable that they continue to provide their customers with very misleading information.

As it currently stands their billing software cannot process it, that is the reason. If there is a debt it attempts to recover that over the next billing cycle, if that cycle is one month it wants payment in full because there is only one month for it to recover the debt in.

If/when their new billing software comes online at some point in the Q4 2023-Q4 2024 window that might change. 

I can see that they cannot make it work.

I'm an accountant, this is not that difficult, it's simple debits and credits, it's just a sales ledger that most businesses operate, basic accounting.

They can produce monthly bills, it's obviously true that they can.

Their problem is that their system expects the bill to be paid for in full, the problem is not producing a monthly bill.

Tell it not to attempt to recover the bill and deduct it from the customers balance instead.

I know I am over simplifying it, but they have had years and years to work on this, and they chose not to.

I would say that they have not chosen to, they have discovered that it is just not possible with their billing system, which is very old, from what I have read online it seems to date from the mid to late nineties, it is based on very old technology, it is very inflexible and is largely based around the idea of a meter reader submitting a reading as they used to do when they visited houses on a periodic basis. At the moment there is a collection of systems that manage billing, more that lead to accounting, various data feeds and plug-ins that have to write in smart reads, as well as a corporate accounting system (probably something SAP?) and then there is the smart meter data side of thigs that is visible in the app and website, but which is not actually part of the billing system. 

It appears they made the decision to upgrade their systems in 2015-2017, looked at options, developing their software etc. and found they were going to need to start from scratch, in the end they ended up licensing Kraken from Octopus in 2021 and will finally get to the deployment stage in 2023-2024 if all goes well.

matt_drummer said:

It's rubbish and the proof of that is the number of people who think they are owed money when they aren't.

I agree it is not the clearest, it is far from ideal, but I would also say it is hardly rocket science. 

matt_drummer said:

Thinking about it a bit more.

If they have a process they can carry out every six months with no issue, all they need to do is do it more often.

If their software can debit a customers account with a bill every six months, there is absolutely no reason why they can't carry out the same process more frequently.

I don't believe the problem is their software can't do it, it already does. They just choose not to do it as regularly as I think is necessary.

It can process the bill every month, but that also ties in with the Direct Debit collection and debt recovery part of the software, which attempts to recover the amount owed over the next billing cycle. There would be manual options if they had a few thousand customers, but they have 5.4 million, it needs to be automated. 

OK, thanks.

Maybe I can see an issue, they have linked direct debits to billing cycles.


It would appear that they have invested little in more than twenty five years on their billing system.

Pretty rubbish if you ask me, I cannot imagine using software from the nineties to produce accounts now. I'm not sure it would even work!

My understanding and I am happy to be corrected, but huge parts of anything SAP (I think, having to use Ariba for dealing with some customers it seems the architecture appears archaic, with a pretty skin on top) and Sage (which when I last used it nine years ago still used a flat file system designed to run on tapes), most banking systems, many of which are written on variants of Fortran/Cobol which were originally designed for punch cards, some are even still written in assembly language and with emulators pretending to be legacy hardware to facilitate an interface with other systems. 

I used punch cards at school in the early 1980's, we used to send our stuff off to a bigger town to be processed!

These companies should be ashamed of themselves if that is the kind of technology they using.

This is not my area of expertise by any means.

But I have implemented many accounting systems over my years in practice and now in a commercial environment.

Accounting is really simple, and it works best if you keep it simple, just reflect what is going on in real life, make it easy to use.


It seems to be the same old story for our country, a lack of investment, doing it on the cheap with no regard for the future.

Robin9

Gerry1 said:

.................. if you make a fuss.

Whenever I've made a fuss -  either by Chat (when it works) or by ComplaintResolution@edfenergy.com   - a bill is rapidly produced - so there is a way

Mobtr

The reasoning behind EDF billing 6 monthly is that the system is designed to get to a zero balance at the annual review , therefore everytime a bill was produced it triggered a d/d review meaning there was a chance the d/d changed every month. This created a lot of complaints so the decision was made to change it to 6 monthly so that the d/d was more stable. SAP is a very antiquated system & not designed for the energy market. Hopefully things will improve with Kraken 

retiringtoosoon

Robin9 said:

Gerry1 said:

.................. if you make a fuss.

Whenever I've made a fuss -  either by Chat (when it works) or by ComplaintResolution@edfenergy.com   - a bill is rapidly produced - so there is a way

Robin9 said:

Gerry1 said:

.................. if you make a fuss.

Whenever I've made a fuss -  either by Chat (when it works) or by ComplaintResolution@edfenergy.com   - a bill is rapidly produced - so there is a way

Same. The only way I could get them to produce was to ask twice and complain.