EON NEXT

Twoods

I’ve had a good amount of account credit as I don’t want to worry about putting the heating on. So, any extra money throughout the year I added to my account ready for winter.  I got an email yesterday about “Reversed account charge” with about 30-40 lines of credit amounts then lots of debit information.
at the bottom of the email it says “it looks as though there were some periods where we didn’t charge you for the energy you used. We’ve now added these charges….”
they have taken £500 from the credit I have. Is this allowed?  I’m really upset about it. How can this happen when I have a smart meter.
thank you for your time. 

QrizB

You're not the first person who's had this recently.

There have also been Octopus customers with the same experience. EON Next uses the same software as Octopus does, Kraken, so it's possible that there's been a weakness in the billing system that they're now catching up with.

Twoods said:

they have taken £500 from the credit I have. Is this allowed?  I’m really upset about it. How can this happen when I have a smart meter.

Yes it's allowed.

As to "how can it happen", you're going to have to go through your old bills, and your new ones, to see what's changed. Hopefully you'll be able to understand where the gaps were.

Exodi

As always, they can bill you for what you used and they're suggesting there are periods you had not paid for what you used (though I accept it sounds like this was their fault).

I'd assume they've credited you for a specific period, and then recalculated the same period (but this time correcting whatever issue it was that caused them to miss certain periods). 

Scot_39

Firstly not all smart meters operate 100%.  About 10% have one or more issues - a fraction of which - which govr seem unwilling to give a decent breakdown of - will be failures to report usage to suppliers.
Some work intermittently, so e stop working and need remote or local intervention to restart.
So you should always check your statements or on line account for readings history - mines are issued monthly in my case at EOn Next - and tge only time I see 2 smart readings is on a cap change month where see values on 1st and my billing date.
EOn users have been seeing this for a couple of years now judging by forum posts.  Some due to a series of estimated bills - hence the check your smart is one of the 90+ % that function well warning above.
Only read a couple of posts in one of the threads on their user forum. 
Some were relatively small corrections e.g. adjusting estimated reads at cap changes when readings submitted either side etc.  Others saw £100s recredited - then in only some cases on same statement rebilled with corrected splits.

If it's rate corrections e.g. on tariff / Ofgem cap changes because adjusting past payments that's one thing.
If any of the extra charges are for unbilled usage a year plus ago, potentially back billing protection might apply.
But the first sanity check is to compare your current meter readings if you can with last bill / statement. 
And then if you can track back to last non estimated bill if that's the reason for the issue on your account. 
EOn email statements to me monthly so hopefully if you keep rpon file you can then compare current with past.
And again check for any frequent reading issues - estimated not smart / actual.
It could be an accounting glitch or error.  As @QrizB post others with same software see the same corrections applied.  But possibly not 30-40 - which could be going back 2-3 years (based on 12 monthly statement periods plus 4 Ofgem cap rate changes on SVT per year etc)

Twoods

Thank you all for your time and great advice

bertiebe

Yep, similar thing here. Eon and I’m not on a smart meter. Bill in the middle of Feb with about 40 changes on it going back to Oct 22 and which took my account all the way up to over £2k in debit and then back down to 25p from where I it was originally. I hope it was worth it for them.

Officer_Dibble

Under the back billing rules they can't charge (for the first time) for energy use more than 12 months ago if:

• You haven't received an accurate bill for the energy used
• You haven't been told about any charges due
• Your direct debit amount was too low to cover charges

That last point could be the issue for Twoods - if the DD was enough to build up significant credit, it wasn't too low to cover charges. If, as he suggests, he's just been paying in extra over the year and that credit wasn't there a year ago any usage more than 12 months ago shouldn't be billed. Contact Eon Next to check if you're covered by the back billing rules. If you need to take it further there's advice on the Citizens' Advice website.