Kafka-esque or What?
The Scottish Power billing system is completely sh**e. I’d call it Kafka-eqsue, but that’s probably an insult to poor old Franz Kafka who rarely put his protagonists through anything quite so bloody confusing.
We have a smart meter, so they can take the readings when they want, and tell exactly what we’ve used between readings. We’re on a standard combined gas & electricity tariff. Simplistically, I’d expect it to work something like the following:
- Once a quarter (e.g. on the same day in March, June, September and December), take a pair of readings from the smart meter
- Once these readings are in hand, compare them to the pair from the last quarter date, and calculate the cost of the power used
- Subtract that from the previous balance plus the payments made in the same period
- Issue a statement within a couple of days, confirming energy used, payments made and new balance.
Oh no, that’s far too f***ing simple and transparent. The actual process bears almost no relation to that. My current best understanding is as follows:
- Bills (“Energy Statements”) turn up at random. They may cover a period as long as almost three months or as short as 1 month.
- The arrival date on the “energy statement” bears almost no relation to the date the statement covers. For example, a statement for the period ending on 1st September may turn up on 28th October
- The Energy Statements usually, but not always, turn up in pairs a few days apart. What typically happens is:
a) The first statement lists what we paid in the period, and some of the charges. It might be for just electricity, just gas, or just part of the charges. Because of this it usually shows a very large credit balance.
b) The second statement, a few days later, lists the remainder of the energy charges. Once these are taken into account the credit balance looks more sensible.
c) The two statements cover an overlapping but not identical period. For example, our last pair covered 2/7–20/9 and 14/7–20/8. In at least one case two of our payments “in the period” were on the first statement and the other was on the second. - If you click the link to see the detailed statement, this may cover a slightly different period to the “Energy Statement”. For example the energy statement covers 2/7–1/9, but the usage readings are for 1/7–1/9 and the payments include 1/9 but ignore 1/7.
I can’t decide whether this is cock-up or conspiracy. Conspiracy is a definite possibility: make the process and the artefacts so opaque and confusing that no customer can ever check their bill, then slide in odd little “errors” or “adjustments” in the power company’s favour. I’m not saying they are doing this, or that I’ve identified any errors myself, but it’s certainly not impossible.
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The other option is cock-up. Maybe there are two legacy billing systems for the different fuels, both written in COBOL in the 1970s and running on aged hardware that needs to be kept alive by a combination of gentle stroking and black masses. The current employees are afraid to touch them. There’s a completely different system which manages payments and account balanced. Maybe the billing systems have no actual connection to the smart metering system, and the meter readings have to be uploaded by a manual process, perhaps copy-typing them into a green screen app. That would explain the two-month delay in issuing the latest statement. Maybe…
Either way, it’s really not acceptable in this day and age.
Originally published at https://www.andrewj.com.
