Octopus bill wording

Arrowsmith10

The bills are wrongly worded for UK customers. The phraseology they use leads to confusion.
How do you get them use the normal "credit" and "debt" instead of the balance phrase they use?
I know its's a policy issue. If you provide a service to a country it's important to use the normal terms in that country. Octopus won't do this .

MikeJXE

I’m an Octopus customer 

My account states 

Your account balance £206.45 Your account is in credit 

How is that confusing ? 

la531983

Yup, not sure why this is confusing.

Keep_pedalling

I can’t see the problem unless you don’t understand the difference between -£50.00 and £50. On the app my balance is shown as £50.25 and under that it says ‘Your account is in credit’ On the web portal it says below the balance figure it says ‘Why is my account in credit’ 

teaselMay

They use the most clear language I've ever experienced with a utility company

oldernonethewiser

Is it the phrase on the bill that says "your new balance is" £xxx?

Seems standard to me.  If you were not in credit there would be a "-" sign before the number.

That is normal is this, the UK, country.  Are you expecting Octopus to adopt some other system or notification?

victor2

This is clearly a debit balance on an Octopus statement...

tacpot12

The phrases "credit" and "debit" in relation to energy bills have been critised for being unfamiliar to the majority of the population. Octopus, as part of their branding and way of doing business, has tried to move away from arcane terminology towards more familiar ways of speaking. 

Ildhund

tacpot12 said:

The phrases "credit" and "debit" in relation to energy bills have been critised for being unfamiliar to the majority of the population. Octopus, as part of their branding and way of doing business, has tried to move away from arcane terminology towards more familiar ways of speaking. 

I can hardly believe that the majority of the population are unfamiliar with credit and debit, and not being an Octopus customer, I'd be interested to see their more familiar way of expressing these concepts. How would you do it?

csduk100

Assuming most people would like to be in CREDIT (i.e. Octopus owe us the money) then the example above could have been stated as £186.14CR

The_Green_Hornet

You should be more concerned about the incorrect calculations shown on their statements.



8.3 x 1.02264 x 39.5 ÷ 3.6 = 93.1 not 92.8

Octopus actually use Units Consumed (Cubic Metres) to two decimal places in their energy usage calculations but for reasons only known to themselves they round it to one decimal place on their statements.

In the above example the Units Consumed (Cubic Metres) was actually 8.27 so the underlying energy usage calculation is correct.

8.27 x 1.02264 x 39.5 ÷ 3.6 = 92.8

Here is another example of their "miscalculations"



1618.1 minus 1521.6 equals 96.5 and not 96.6

The reason for this one is that on Octopus Tracker the Energy Used figure is actually calculated by adding up all the daily usage amounts as shown at the back of the statement and not the difference between the meter start and end readings.

If you look at your statements I am sure you will find your own examples.